Narrating Rampur’s cuisine: cookbooks, forgotten foods, and culinary memories

Rampur, a princely state established by Rohilla Pathans in 1774, became the cultural node, or markaz, of north Indian Muslim culture under the patronage of its ruling Nawabs. This article uncovers the narrative arc of Rampur cuisine and foodways by examining archival sources from the nineteenth century on Rampur’s cuisine preserved at the Rampur Raza Library, as well as historical records and gastronomic memory of culinary practitioners and other members of society. Through a process of amalgamation and improvisation, it grew out of the Delhi and Lucknow cuisines into a distinctly Paḵẖtun (an ethnolinguistic group native to southern Afghanistan and northern Pakistan) foodway, which was adapted and textualized as a new “haute” Rampur cuisine by the Nawabs and the nobility. The study delves into the paratexts of the archived manuscripts – their language, authorship, and authorial motivation – to delineate cultural markers of this culinary journey while also recovering the intergenerational transmission of sensual memories. It interrogates how the narrative arc of Rampur cuisine reveals relationships with the past, epochal socio-political changes, and changing cultural identities with the appropriation and forgetting of foodways.