Fusion Cooking Had Royal Patrons Before It Had a Name
Cooking Delights of the Maharajas sat on a shelf in our house long before I understood what it was asking me to notice. Digvijaya Singh, the Maharaja of Sailana, had spent years collecting recipes out of the kitchens of Hyderabad, Kashmir and Bhopal, and the book he built from them read less like a cookbook and more like a map of alliances. Every dish carried a lineage. Every lineage carried a marriage, a war, or a houseguest behind it. I misremembered its foreword for years. I was certain Madhur Jaffrey had written it. It was Gayatri Devi, the Maharani of Jaipur, who called Singh "not only a gourmet but a superb cook" (Singh). The mix-up says something about how those two names had fused together in my head long before I knew what culinary fusion meant as a term. Gayatri Devi was the reason I wrote a letter to a palace as a teenager, and the reason I still remember getting one back. Her memoir, A Princess Remembers , mentions creme brulee somewhere in its parade of...
