ESSAY

THE KITCHEN SUTRA

Holly Shaffer takes us on a tour of recipes, ancient and modern, that seek to promote health and combine artistry.

The famous treatise on painting, the Citrasutra, begins with a

story. The sage Narayana is engaged in penance in the mountains,
building such heat that the gods, fearing his power, send the
loveliest of nymphs to distract him. But Narayana is not distracted.
Rather, he turns his attention to another type of creation. He picks
a mango, peels and juices it, and with the pigment draws an even
lovelier woman to shame them. Thus she, Urvasi, comes into being
as a mango-yellow form.1

Most colours derive from plants and minerals, initiating a basic

relationship between food and art in the ‘recipe’, the subject of this
essay, specifically in their ingredients. That a treatise on painting
should include a pigment made of a richly toned fruit is entirely
apt. Besides the pulp, the mango’s leaves were infamously fed to
cows, dying their urine that was then collected and processed into
a bright yellow pigment.2 Roots and fruits seem to afford reds and
yellows in particular as compared to the mineral and shrub-based
greens and blues. Turmeric, saffron and safflower, pomegranate
rind and madder, chay root and henna, among others, have dyed
textiles golden and rosy – hues seen in bright silks as in the
image I have used.3 Yet, sometimes, colours mix into others as
qualities rather than sources. Pale green pista’i is a mixture of
pomegranate rind and indigo rather than ground pistachio nuts4
while saffron though consistently listed in dye books from the
past two thousand years does not seem to have been in wide use
as a colorant, indicating an imagined rather than real opulence.5

The recipe is a historical text that unites food and art, as well as
medicine, together by prescription. It is an avenue into the past,
but as with saffron used (or not) as a dye, one must be cautious.
A recipe is simply a method that works alongside the makers, the
ingredients, the vessels, the utensils and the techniques. It is a
portal to the sensory combination it provokes.
If we go through the manuscripts that include recipes, beginning
with the Vedas and concluding in the present, most begin with health
and move into gastronomy as well as artistry. One of the earliest,
the Atharvaveda, written around 1000 BC, for instance, includes
charms and spells to ward off maladies, and some remedies, such
as a coating of black pepper to heal an arrow wound.6 The Susruta
Samhita, written around 600 BC, includes sweet and savoury
medicines that could be “light and tonic, improve the complexion
and eyesight.” Mixing yoghurt with jaggery, ginger, black pepper
and long pepper, straining it through cloth and flavouring it with
camphor and pomegranate seeds produced Sattakas, for instance.7
The 12th century Manasollasa, the “refresher of the mind,” includes
recipes for medicine alongside royal delectations with a particular
attention paid to the aesthetics of the dish. One is explicitly called
the five colours, or panchvarni, which is made by simmering pieces
of intestine, as if a skein of cloth, with what seem to be a range of
shades: mustard seeds, myrobalan, ginger, a sour flavouring, salt
and asafoetida until the sauce thickens.8
Unknown Deccani artist. A Paan Plate. Cast, pierced and engraved silver.
18th century. Image courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Medicine and food, food and art, each use a palette. In this painting
from Delhi around 1825, a surgeon attends to a patient’s leg. The
gem like colours that compose the image are repeated in a round
partitioned box by the doctor’s side as if the artist had simply looked
down at his own paints. Yet a pharmacy, traditionally maintained on
the same premises as the doctor’s office, is precisely such a pattern
of labelled earthenware jars, glasses and other vessels as seen in the
niche in the painting, from flavoured syrups like seeped fuchsia
hibiscus flowers for sharbat to dense fruit jams, such as gooseberry
stewed to a thick paste for amla ka murabba, to powdered churan to
aid digestion such as that made from ginger and lime.9
Such ingredients become the source for culinary play and delight.
In the Manasollasa, for instance, the sour amla, revered for its
medicinal value (so high in Vitamin C!), becomes a visual trick. A
dish named “puryala, specifies meat shaped into amla-like pieces
which were cooked with spices.” Likewise, liver was “carved into
the globular shape of betel nuts” and other meats into “plum-
shaped pieces” to create a meal of savouries “roasted on charcoal,
and then fried with spices, eventually to be placed in curds, or in a
decoction of black mustard…” carved into fruits.10

ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III 41
ESSAY

Unknown Indian artist. Clamp-resist and dyed silk. 17th century. Image courtesy Rogers Fund, 1975, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Unknown Delhi artist. An Ayurvedic surgeon attends to a patient’s leg. Opaque watercolour on paper. 1825. Image courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

Thus, food becomes sculpture, if not a tableau. In the
Ni’matnama, or Book of Delights, written in Mandu around
1500 for the Sultanate king Ghiyath al-Din Shahi and his
son Nasir al-Din the “hospitality of Ghiyath Shahi” provides
an array of fruits, meats and vegetables of all different scales,
shapes, shades and shimmers.11 One description includes “…a,
roast whole camel… cups of palm sugar…samosas, green shoots
covered in gold and silver or dyed with saffron…” A watermelon
on offer includes thin pieces of gold, which the imbiber can
preserve as currency. The stems of tubers, cooked greens and the
green leaves of jasmine shoots are also wrapped in gold leaf. The
food is delivered “on a tray of seven colours” and “a tray laden
with gold…”12
An approximation of such a spread is seen in numerous Mughal
and late 18th century paintings, where cooks produce sumptuous
feasts. In illustrated copies of the Akbarnama might the blue
and white porcelain dishes house one of the recipes transcribed
in the Ain-i Akbari, the History of the Mughal Emperor Akbar,
written in 1590?13 One can imagine a zard birinj, sugared rice
dotted with raisins, almonds and pistachios and coloured with
saffron and cinnamon, piled as high as the bronze dome cover.14
An 18th century painting, for instance, vibrantly displays kings and
devotees paying homage to Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh
religion, while also feasting against a grassy turquoise background.
In the centre, cooks mix and roll dough for bread, pound spices
and strain sauces; while on the right supplicants are served rice,
sauces and beverages from what appear to be base and precious
metals, terracotta and leaf vessels.15
ESSAY
Food and art fuse in the digestive paan, often wrapped in
a delicate film of silver. One recipe from the Ni’matnama,
using catechu essence, sapari, lime and camphor, focuses on its
restorative qualities. Catechu essence “brings strength, increases
good looks and repels…leprosy, in addition to snakebite, coughs
and poisons”. Even broken bones can be mended while “lac may
be used in illness as it is full of good qualities.”16 The betel nut,
like lac, produces a red pigment, a point not lost on the poet Amir
Khusro in his Ode to Paan:
A chew of betel bound into a hundred leaves,
Came to hand like a hundred-petalled flower.
Rare leaf, like a flower in a garden,
Hindustan’s most beautiful delicacy,
Sharp as a rearing stallion’s ear,
Sharp in both shape and taste,
In sharpness a tool to cut roots,
As the Prophet’s words tell us.
Full of veins with no trace of blood,
Yet from its veins blood races out,
Wondrous plant, for placed in the mouth,
Blood comes from its body like a living thing.17
Amir Khusro garners all aspects of paan in his poem, such as
the “sharp…sharp” blade of the betel nut cutter slicing through
the nut, visually riven with “veins.” One can imagine the betel
nut, acidic white lime and spices housed in a betel box, fitted
with individuated sections.18 The paan’s ingredients could then
be layered to taste and folded in a betel leaf to be served on such
a perforated silver plate as can be seen in the image we’ve used,
“like a hundred-petalled flower.” When chewed, a juice “comes
from its body” like blood, like paint, to spray the walls and floors.
Thus paan is as much about its stream of red as it is about its
making and storage. Indeed, so many recipes are not simply for
food or medicine but for the production of goods that in turn
house, protect and picture food: clay pottery and metal vessels,
textile dyes and paints. The ingredients for these objects too
overlap. The instructions for how to prepare a wall for a mural
in the Citrasutra, for example, follow the same pattern as for a
culinary dish: “adding clay to the brickdust of three kinds in the
proportion of 1 to 3, he should add bedellium, beeswax,” various
extracts, “and jaggery in equal parts, after he has mixed them with
safflower oil.” After this burnt plaster is added, coarse grass and
hemp fibres are mixed in and finally, the mixture is soaked in a
“slimy sugar solution” and left for a month.19
Metal-casting also follows the patterns of food production. I
recently saw a metal tube being sand-cast in Ahmedabad, and
asked the proprietor, while sniffing the sweet air, what exactly
was being mixed with the sand.20 Jaggery, he said, and indeed an
artisan was mixing sand (rather than flour) with the thick syrupy
molasses, rolling it like dough, and tipping the steaming liquid
metal into the mould like any batter.
Food is simply one dimension or class of art. This is certainly the
case in manuals that describe the tools of artisans and their wares,
as well as in their recipe books. For example, a series of craftsmen
painted in 19th century Kashmir includes bread, kebab and sweet
makers alongside potters, dyers, papermakers and coppersmiths.
The painting of bakers, for instance, offers a step by step illustrated
guide from the ingredients and tools for baking bread to preparing
and resting the dough, to cooking it in a tandoor, to its sale, just
ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III 43
 Unknown Indian artist. Kings and Sikh devotees paying homage to Guru Nanak, the founder of the Sikh religion.
Opaque watercolour on paper. 18th century. Image courtesy Wellcome Library, London.

44 ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III
ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III 45
ESSAY

as the process of brass workers shows the melting of the metal to its
embossed décor, the potters throwing their pots, the papermakers mixing
the pulp and sizing the paper.21

The vessels that house food and the food prepared within are often
interrelated. This is the case with the technique known as dum pukht in
Persian, to cook with breath, to bake. A vessel is sealed with dough, and
coals are placed beneath and on top to slow cook what is housed within.
In Kannada this technique is called kanika and is seen in a preparation
of bhojanadhika-roti. The scholar K. T. Achaya writes that fried bread is
“broken up into small pieces [and] mixed with milk, cream, coconut milk,
mango juice and sugar, and pressed into a ball. This is placed within a
covering of wheat dough, and baked under seal on a hot tile with frequent
turning of the vessel. When done, the upper crust is sliced off and ghee
and sugar poured in before consumption.”22

There are also numerous discussions in texts of the qualities of vessels

and their relationship to food. In the Manasollasa, the author writes
that “even though food preparations served in earthen vessels taste well,
kings must be served in vessels made of gold.”23 A Sanskrit treatise titled
Ksemakutuhalam (Diet and Well-Being), likely written around 1550 at
the court of King Vikramasena in Ujjain, details the proper materials for
cooking: the best cooking pots are made of clay, since they imbue the food
with healthful qualities, but rich men and kings use gold and silver vessels
since they cure deranged doshas and improve the intellect. Boiled rice can
be served in its own cooking pot; other dishes should be transferred to a
serving plate. Ghee is stored in a wooden or iron pot. Milk products are
served only in earthenware containers.24

A visit to the Utensils Museum in Ahmedabad, and its adjacent Gujarati

restaurant, Vishalla, highlights a vessel’s connection to its contents. The
delectable undhiyu, for instance, is a stew of fresh winter vegetables that
range from purple yam to banana to green peas and aubergine mixed with
a green masala of coriander, fenugreek and spring garlic, that is sealed in
a clay pot and cooked in the embers of a fire.25 Mango pulp, yoghurt and
buttermilk are often offered in unbaked clay, because its porousness soaks
up excess liquid and keeps the food cool. Many of these vessels are served
in the restaurant, but the museum houses thousands of historical ones. It
displays numerous metal kitchen wares from sieves and graters to ladles
and measuring cups to spoons with a serrated wheel, for cutting dough
in ease and style.

A recipe is therefore a prescription, a list, an outline rather than the

product. The product exists somewhere in between the recipe and the
maker, and that is why it is critical to talk to artisans as well as to study
historical manuscripts, paintings and objects. Bharti Majewadia, for
instance, is a cook whom Prajna Desai talks with in her book The Indecisive
Chicken (2015) produced as part of the Food Project of the Dharavi
Biennale. Majewadia comes from a family of potters, and her recipes, as
Desai writes, “depend on the groundwork of cooked clay.”26 Majewadia
lures the charred and smoothed eggplant in Baingan ka bharta into even
more smokiness by stirring it with a burned shard of pottery. Likewise,
she cooks Jwar ki khichdi, a sweet porridge, in an unglazed clay vessel. If
the clay is soaked, it maintains water in its pores, which turns to steam
with the heat, moistening the grains. These are qualities of materials that
only artisans know. In this case Majewadia, a potter and a cook – the
embodiment of how food and art align – has provided the recipe.

The Utensils Museum, Ahmedabad.

Photograph by Holly Shaffer.

46 ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III
 ESSAY

End-Notes
1) The Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana, ed. and trans. by Parul Dave
Mukherji, Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2001, Adhyaya 35.
The Citrasutra was likely written between 500 and 900 AD.

2) See ‘Indian Yellow’ in The Pigment Compendium, Oxford: Elsevier, 2004, pg. 199.

3) Also see the Patolu sari dyed with turmeric, from Patan, Gujarat, early 20th
century (IS 89-1963) described in Rosemary Crill, “Indian blues…and reds…
and yellows,” V&A Blog, December 10, 2014.

4) See Sylvia Houghteling, “Painting with Dyes in Early Modern South Asia,” in
RumiNations, Metropolitan Museum of Art Blog, May 17, 2016.

5) See The Fabric of India, ed. by Rosemary Crill, V&A Publishing, 2015, pgs.
34-35.

6) Colleen Taylor Sen, Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India, Reaktion,
2015, pg. 117.

7) Sen, Feasts and Fasts, pgs. 124-5.

8) Sen, Feasts and Fasts, pg. 143.

9) Information from interviews with Raja Suleiman of Mahmudabad and Hakim

Khawar Nawab in Lucknow.

10) K. T. Achaya, A Historical Companion to Indian Food, Oxford University Press,

1994, pg. 90.

11) The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan’s Book of
Delights, trans. by Norah M. Titley, Routledge, 2005, pgs. 41-44 for instance.

12) The Ni’matnama, pg. 77.

13) See the British Library ‘Turning the Pages’ of the Baburnama. See folios
256v-257r for instance: http://www.bl.uk/turning-the-pages/?id=b4e4b216-
731f-44a5-ad21-a6091b7ef8f2&type=book and folios from the Akbarnama
at the Victoria and Albert Museum, such as IS.2.28-1896 of Akbar Receiving
the Iranian Ambassador Sayyid Beg. Huge iron pots as well as various sizes of
ceramic dishes and metal covers are visible.

14) Abul Fazl, The Ain-i Akbari, trans. by H. Blochmann, Vol. 1, Asiatic Society
of Bengal, 1873, pg. 59.

15) Other paintings visualize banquets resplendent with containers and utensils.
In one 18th century painting set in a palace courtyard, banana leaves and blue and
white porcelain have been spread on a crisp white cloth and piled with saffron-
coloured rice and fried slivers of onion. Bowls of meat and vegetable delicacies
and plates of kebabs, pickles, salads and roundels of bread complete the setting.
A server leans before the noble as if about to open the steaming vessel and serve
the contents onto his plate, golden spoons at the ready. See A Nawab’s Banquet,
Mughal India, ca. 1780, British Museum (1934, 1203, 0.3).

16) The Ni’matnama, pg. 49. For images of betel chewing as well as samosas from
this manuscript see, the British Library Images Online and http://www.columbia.edu/
itc/mealac/pritchett/00routesdata/1400_1499/mandu/nimatnama/nimatnama.html.

17) Quoted in Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Indo-Persian Travels

in the Age of Discoveries, Cambridge University Press, 2007, pg. 75, and Sen,
Feasts and Fasts, pg. 159.

18) Such a silver betel box is at the V&A Museum. See: IM.271-1916.

19) The Citrasutra of the Visnudharmottara Purana, Adhyaya 40, pgs. 1-5.

20) I thank Ned Cooke and Ami Potter from Yale University who organized this trip.

21) British Library, Add. Or. 1681: Bakers, Kashmir, 1850-1860, and Add.
Or. 1735: Dyer at work dying cloth, Kashmir, 1850-1860. Add. Or. 1660-1745
is a series of eighty-six drawings bound in a volume depicting the trades
and occupations in Kashmir produced circa 1850-1860. For reproductions
of these pages see: http://www.searchkashmir.org/2009/08/bakers-
kashmir-1850-1860-2009.html and http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/
collectioncare/2015/04/making-islamic-style-paper.html

22) Achaya, A Historical Companion to Indian Food, pg. 118.

23) Achaya, A Historical Companion to Indian Food, pg. 89.

24) Sen, Feasts and Fasts, pg. 172, and pgs. 131-132 for the specific health
benefits related to cooking in particular materials. Also see K. T. Achaya,
A Historical Companion to Indian Food, pg. 94.

25) See Vikram Doctor, “Celebrating the Indian Winter with the Gujarati
Undhiyu,” The Real Food Podcast. December 8, 2015.

26) See Prajna Desai, The Indecisive Chicken, 2015. I thank Vikram Doctor for
suggesting this book.

ART India The Art News Magazine of India September 2016 Volume XX Issue III 47