Meat on and off the Royal Menu: The Medieval Delight of the Mind & the Erasure of Meat from Indian Recipe Collections

Abstract

ABSTRACT A close study of the twelfth-century Delight of the Mind’s (Mānasollāsa’s) section on cooking called “The Enjoyment of Food” reveals that meat dominated the royal menu in medieval South India. The valuable recipes in this Sanskrit royal encyclopedia’s section of 258 verses on food detail primarily how to prepare wild fish and game, but also meat from tortoise, bandicoot, ram (mutton), other domesticated animals, and an array of delectable foods of the period. Consuming almost all animals that moved in the kingdom formed part of Western Chalukyan emperor Someśvara´s assertion of royal dominion, yet investigation into this recipe collection’s textual history as well as that of other royal recipe collections suggests that the once abundant meat recipes have often been removed from the record, leaving the false impression of more vegetarian dietary practice than really pertained to South Asia’s past. This later “veggie-washing” concerns Hindu ideologies of nonviolence and the disavowal of animal slaughter in ritual sacrifice, both of which originated in Jain and Buddhist ideologies yet have become attached to Hindu ideals of vegetarianism, forming part of a new moral culinary imperative that has advanced over roughly the second millennium of the Common Era. Exploring this topic using the lens of power and politics as they relate to food and dining allows the reader to observe shifts in royal culinary writing as these texts became permeated with religious ideals.