Books that Shed Light: Eaton on Islam in Bengal
In thinking about Islamic culinary traditions in India, one of the books I’ve found most useful is Richard Eaton’s The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier 1204-1760 (University of California Press, 1994). OK, it’s not about the courts of the Sultans or the Mughals. OK, it hardly mentions food. But it is wonderfully illuminating on how different Muslim invaders tackled the problem of how to rule a huge territory of conquered Hindu peoples. This offers lots of hints about how to think about how they might have used courtly cuisine.
Plus Eaton has a great couple of pages on the “covenant of salt” from ancient Mesopotamia to seventeenth century India. Salt as the symbol of the tie between patron and client.
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