A state banquet at the palace of an Indian prince during the late nineteenth or early twentieth century would have presented a ‘hybrid mélange of Hindu, Mughal and English court customs’. Nowhere was this cultural hodgepodge more apparent than in the dishes served at table. Highly spiced and scented Mughal delicacies, perfected at the kitchens in Awadh, would be presented alongside Anglo-Indian staples such as Mulligatawny soup or Christmas pudding. Just like dress or religion, food had become a signifier of cultural accommodation as well as divergence. While an aesthetic pleasure, it was innately connected with the larger political and economic climate of the era. In this manner, local, regional or national (culinary) histories became inherently interwoven with global narratives of socio-political change. In this chapter, I will argue that the courtly women of princely India were particularly important players in the transmission and cultivation of different culinary styles and food appreciation in colonial India.

Zenana women were invariably the producers, patrons or transmitters of food in the royal household, and through the act of dynastic marriage they further spread different cuisines and recipes across the diverse regions of the sub-continent. They were also crucial in creating new ideas of fusion cooking during the colonial period: both in hybridizing the exchange between European and Indian traditions of cooking as well as through the merging of different regional culinary systems across India, which had more limited interaction before the Pax Britannica.