The False Culinary Attribution and the socalled "Experts"
The Mughlai Myth
Search Wikipedia for the origin of kulfi, kofta, pulao, or biryani. You will find nearly identical language every time. The phrases repeat like a mantra: "likely introduced by the Mughal court," "food historians suggest it evolved under Mughal patronage." Click the citation. It leads, almost invariably, to two books. The first is Michael Krondl's Sweet Invention: A History of Dessert (Chicago Review Press, 2011). The second is Charmaine O'Brien's Flavours of Delhi: A Food Lover's Guide (Penguin, 2003). These are not academic histories. They are food travel guides for general readers. Neither author has any grounding in Sanskrit literature, Indology, or primary historical research. Yet both are cited as "food historian authorities." That one citation error has been repeated until it became common wisdom.
In this article we demolish that myth, point by point, using the primary sources that Krondl and O'Brien ignored or perhaps did not know that existed.
The Lazy Food Writers Who Stole India's Culinary History.
Here we are going to discuss two authors relied in Wikipedia articles but ther are many more like them. The fact of the matter is that neither author is a historian. Neither holds qualifications in history, Indology, or historical linguistics. Neither conducted primary source research. They wrote food catalogues. They were merely reposting on what they ate. They added historical embellishment to make a good story. India's pop-history ecosystem promoted them as historians, something they never claimed themselves. Here is the introduction to them.
Michael Krondl
Michael Krondl is a New York-based culinary writer and former chef. His book Sweet Invention is a popular-history survey of dessert traditions across the globe. It covers Viennese pastry, Ottoman halva, and Indian confectionary. It is written for a general trade audience. Krondl cannot read Sanskrit, Prakrit, Kannada, or any regional Indian language. For his India chapter, he relied exclusively on English translations of Persian Mughal court records. His principal source was Abu'l-Fazl's Ain-i-Akbari. From that single source, he extrapolated freely.
His central claim: kulfi was a Mughal invention. His evidence: the Ain-i-Akbari describes saltpetre being used to chill royal drinking water in the imperial pantry (Abdar Khana). He assumed rest of his conclusions.
Charmaine O'Brien
Charmaine O'Brien is an Australian food writer. Her book Flavours of Delhi is explicitly subtitled "A Food Lover's Guide." It is a travel guide, not a history. Her follow-up, The Penguin Food Guide to India, is similarly a culinary travelogue. Her research method was to interview Old Delhi shopkeepers, chefs, and sweet vendors. She recorded their romantic origin legends and published them as historical fact. The legends included claims such as: "this recipe was served at Akbar's court" and "this was a Nawab's special dish."
Technological Fraud - The Saltpetre Tangent
The most egregious historical leap in Krondl's work is what can only be called the Saltpetre Tangent.
The Ain-i-Akbari contains a section on the imperial Abdar Khana (the royal pantry). It describes two things. First: saltpetre (potassium nitrate, shora) was dissolved in water to chill the Emperor's drinking water. Second: large blocks of ice were transported from the Himalayan foothills to Agra and Delhi each summer. This was what Krondl read.
But this is the leap of assumption he made: because the Mughal court used saltpetre to chill water, the Mughals therefore invented kulfi.
The logical failures are severe:
1. Technology vs. Product: Chilling water with saltpetre is a basic endothermic reaction. Making kulfi is entirely different. Kulfi requires slow-reducing full-fat dairy for several hours to produce khoya (thickened milk solids). It requires flavouring with saffron, cardamom, and pistachio. It requires pouring the mixture into conical metal molds. The two processes share one chemical compound. Sharing a compound is not inventing a food.
2. From Imperial Pantry to Street Vendor: Krondl's claim implies kulfi was a daily Mughal imperial staple for centuries. Any Delhi resident knows otherwise. World's second most populous city of two crore people, there are barely a handful of dedicated kulfi vendors. Gulab jamun and Rasgulla are found in every third sweet shop. Kulfi falooda needs specialist equipment and a dedicated vendor. That scarcity is direct evidence against the claim of imperial ubiquity.
3. The Poet-Emperor's Silence: Bahadur Shah Zafar was a poet who wrote about court pleasures in detail. He composed verses on mangoes and the paandaan. If kulfi had been a beloved daily Mughal dessert since Akbar's time, it would appear in imperial poetry and royal kitchen records. It does not. That silence is telling.
4. The Bengal Test: Bengal was close to the eastern Mughal provincial capital at Murshidabad. Mughal influence reached Bengal easily. Yet Bengal's entire dessert tradition is built on chhena (fresh cottage cheese): roshogolla, sandesh, mishti doi. Kulfi is structurally absent from Bengali sweet culture today. If kulfi had been a Mughal imperial staple for two centuries, some trace would exist in Bengal. It does not.
Abu'l-Fazl Is Not a Neutral Witness
Krondl and O'Brien's second failure is treating the Ain-i-Akbari as objective historical truth.
Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak was Akbar's court historian, chief secretary, and chief propagandist. The Ain-i-Akbari is volume three of the Akbarnama, commissioned by Akbar himself. Its purpose was to present Akbar as a divinely ordained universal sovereign. Under his wise rule, every aspect of administration, culture, science, and cuisine had supposedly been perfected.
This is an imperial panegyric, not a neutral record. A trained historian applies Quellenkritik (source criticism) to such documents. The questions are simple: Who wrote this? For whom? What does it omit? What do non-courtly sources say about the same period?
Krondl and O'Brien asked none of these questions. They found a saltpetre reference in an imperial propaganda document. They accepted it as fact. They built an origin story on it without checking a single regional or non-Persian source. That is not historical method. That is confirmation bias with a footnote.
Reality of Central Asia
To understand why the Mughals could not have invented Indian cuisine, one must understand where they came from.
Babur, the dynasty's founder, came from the Fergana Valley in modern Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. The culture he carried was fundamentally nomadic and pastoralist. Its food reflected that agrarian ecology with following popular cuisine:
- Boiled and spit-roasted mutton (shashlik)
- Dried and heavily salted horse meat (kazi)
- Simple unleavened flatbreads (naan, lavash)
- Fermented mare's milk (kumiss)
- Basic rice cooked with fatty mutton (palov/pilaf)
- Dried fruits: apricots, raisins, melons
What Central Asia did not produce:
- Tropical spice agriculture (cardamom, clove, black pepper, turmeric, ginger, cinnamon, fenugreek)
- Mustard oil culinary traditions
- Coconut-based cooking
- The rich diversity of lentils and pulses (dal culture)
- Complex sugarcane processing (gur, jaggery, refined khand)
- The deep-fried, syrup-soaked sweet tradition of the Gangetic plains
Babur himself is the most eloquent witness on this point. His personal memoir, the Baburnama, is arguably the most honest document any Mughal produced. In it, Babur complained repeatedly about Hindustan:
"Hindustan is a place of little charm. There is no beauty in its people, no graceful social intercourse, no poetic talent or understanding... There are no good horses, no good dogs, no grapes, musk-melons, or first-rate fruits..."
This is a man missing the melons of Fergana. He was not bringing a superior culinary tradition to a barbaric land. He was a pastoralist warlord confused by the food of a civilisation far richer than his own. The idea that his descendants, within two generations, invented kulfi, dum pukht, kebab, and biryani is not history. It is mythology.
Primary Sources Establishing India's Pre-Mughal Culinary
The refutation of the Mughal food-invention myth lies in Sanskrit and regional Indian texts. These texts predate the Mughal dynasty by centuries. Krondl and O'Brien cannot read any of them. Predictably, none appear in their work.
The Manasollasa (circa 1130 CE) - 400 Years Before Babur
The Mānasollāsa (मानसोल्लास), also called Abhilashitartha Chintamani (अभिलाषितार्थ चिन्तामणि), is a Sanskrit encyclopaedia of statecraft, arts, sciences, and gastronomy. It was written by the Western Chalukya king Someshvara III of Karnataka around 1130 CE. It predates Babur's arrival by nearly four hundred years.
Its chapters on food preparation document:
- Skewer-roasted meat (bhunajja / shalaka mamsa): meat marinated in spices, roasted on iron skewers over live charcoal. This is the structural ancestor of the tandoori kebab.
- Spiced minced-meat balls (kavikachchu): finely pounded meat mixed with spices and formed into balls. This is the structural ancestor of kofta.
- Meat cooked with aromatic rice (mamsa-odan): spiced meat cooked with rice in layers. This is the structural ancestor of biryani and pulao.
- Acid-marinated meats: meats marinated in curd (dahi) and tamarind (imli/amlika). This technique is identical to modern dum-style preparation.
- Spice tempering (tadka/chaunk): heating whole spices in hot fat before adding to a dish. This is the foundational technique of all Indian cooking.
All of this existed four centuries before Akbar's coronation.
The Pakadarpana - The Royal Culinary Manual
The Pākadarpaṇa (पाकदर्पण), or "Mirror of Cooking," is attributed in Sanskrit tradition to King Nala of the Mahabharata. The Nishad King is credited as the first great chef in Indian literature. Medieval court commentators compiled the text in scholarly form. It documents:
- Pit-cooking (bhu-shula): sealed underground cooking chambers with live coals above and below. This is the direct structural antecedent of dum pukht slow cooking.
- Spice-blending protocols and oil-tempering sequences.
- Chilled and perfumed dairy preparations using aromatic flowers, saffron, and reduced milk.
Dum pukht is routinely attributed to the Awadhi Nawabs of the 18th century or to the Mughal court. Its core sealed-pot technique appears in Sanskrit texts that predate both.
There is another reason for modern historians to ignore this work. The fact that the King was Nishad and a chef was something very damaging to the caste atrocity literature written for British and their successors after independence in 1947.
The Kshirapaka Tradition - Ancient Reduced Milk Dairy
Kshirapaka (क्षीरपाक), often translated as "medicated milk," is a unique and fundamental preparation in Ayurvedic pharmaceutics (Bhaishajya Kalpana). It involves boiling medicinal herbs with milk and water until only the milk remains, thereby extracting and infusing the therapeutic properties of the herbs into the milk. This Sanskrit Ayurvedic and culinary texts document the milk cooking tradition systematically. This is the slow reduction of full-fat milk over hours into dense, sweet, aromatic preparations. It tells that milk acts as a unique solvent that can dissolve both water-soluble and fat-soluble active constituents from the herbs, making the formulation more efficacious than simple water-based decoctions
The Charaka Samhita (compiled approximately 1st century CE) describes ksheera (sweetened reduced milk), rabri (layered clotted cream), and khoya/mawa (fully reduced milk solids). These preparations predate Islam in Central Asia entirely. These are the ingrediants required to make Kulfi.
The dairy technology underlying kulfi is an Indian invention, documented in Indian sources, centuries before any Mughal court existed.
The Lokopakara (1025 CE) - Kannada Culinary Record
The Lokopakara (ಲೋಕೋಪಕಾರ, "For the Benefit of People") is a 12th-century Old Kannada encyclopedia compiled by the poet-scholar Chavundaraya II in 1025 CE. It is one of the earliest comprehensive knowledge compendiums in the Kannada language, designed to make practical sciences accessible to common people who did not know Sanskrit.
It predates the Manasollasa by a century. It has 12 Chapters starting with Astrology. Chapter 8 deals with cookery. It documents fermented pulse batters, spiced meat preparations, curd-marinated grilled dishes, and complex rice-pulse combinations. These texts span multiple regions and languages.
Together, they establish one clear fact.
The culinary sophistication attributed to the Mughal court was indigenous to India and existed centuries before any Mughal emperor sat on any Indian throne.
The "Expert Citation" Feedback Loop
The mechanism by which these errors became entrenched is a systemic problem, not merely an individual failing.
1. Step 1: Michael Krondl (culinary writer, former chef) publishes Sweet Invention (2011). He attributes kulfi to the Mughal court, citing the Ain-i-Akbari saltpetre passage. His book has an ISBN and comes from a recognized press.
2. Step 2: Wikipedia editors add Krondl's claim to the Kulfi article with a footnote. The hedges are present: "food historian suggests," "likely evolved." But most readers do not see the hedges. They see the authority.
3. Step 3: O'Brien's Flavours of Delhi is similarly cited for Old Delhi food history. The Mughal attribution now has a second "independent" source. Wikipedia's multiple-source threshold is satisfied.
4. Step 4: Travel blogs, food magazines, restaurant marketing, AI models, and school project websites all cite Wikipedia. The false claim is amplified millions of times.
5. Step 5: Anyone who challenges the claim is directed to Wikipedia and given the Krondl/O'Brien citations as evidence. The loop is complete.
The result is a self-referential edifice of lazy attribution. One culinary writer's speculation, dressed in academic language and equipped with an ISBN, becomes indistinguishable from rigorous historical research. The Manasollasa, the Pakadarpana, the Kshirapaka dairy tradition, the Periplus trade records, Manucci, Bernier: none of these appear in the Wikipedia article on kulfi. They are not cited because Krondl and O'Brien did not know about them.
We will discuss some more historical primary sources of contemporary period to demolish the myth of Mughal culinary origins completely.
Primary Sources
1. Babur, Zahiruddin Muhammad. Baburnama (Memoirs of Babur). Chagatai Turkish, circa 1530 CE. Trans. Annette Beveridge. London: Luzac and Co., 1922. - Vol. 1: https://archive.org/details/baburnamainengli01babuuoft - DLI copy: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.44739
2. Abu'l-Fazl ibn Mubarak. Ain-i-Akbari. Persian, circa 1590s CE. Trans. H. Blochmann (Vol. 1); H.S. Jarrett (Vols. 2-3). Calcutta: Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1873. - Vol. 1: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.32526 - Vol. 2: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.460916 - Vol. 3: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.46757
3. Someshvara III (Western Chalukya). Manasollasa (Abhilashitartha Chintamani). Sanskrit, circa 1130 CE. Ed. G.K. Shrigondekar. Baroda: Oriental Institute (Gaekwad's Oriental Series), 1925. - Vol. I: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.280843 - Vol. II: https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.208789 - Note: Sanskrit critical edition with English introduction. No complete English translation exists. 4. Hindu: Soups and Climate Science figure in 12th century encyclopaedia in sanskrit
5. Attributed to King Nala. Pakadarpana ("Mirror of Cooking"). Sanskrit, pre-medieval. Ed. Vamacharya Bhattacharya, with Hindi commentary by Indra Deva Tripathi. - https://archive.org/details/pakadarpanaofnalamadhurihindicommentaryindradevatripathied.vamcharyabhattacharya_367_T - Note: Sanskrit text with Hindi commentary.
7. Chavundaraya. Lokopakara. Kannada, 1025 CE. Ed. H. Sesha Iyengar, 1950. - https://archive.org/details/20230616_20230616_1333 - Note: Original Kannada text. No English translation exists.
8. Charaka Samhita. Sanskrit, compiled circa 1st century CE. Trans. Kaviraj Avinash Chandra Kaviratna. - https://archive.org/details/CharakaSamhitaAgnivesaAvinashChandraKaviratnaVolume15Translation - Alternate copy: https://archive.org/details/BIUSante_47357
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