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 state dinners and shikar camps from her early married life in Jaipur. I was young enough that a French dessert turning up inside a Rajasthani court felt like a puzzle rather than a fact of history, so I wrote to her about it. I do not remember what I said, or how a stranger's letter found its way past a palace's mail room. I remember that she answered.

Fusion Before the Word Existed

Cooking Delights of the Maharajas was not the only book doing this work on my shelf. Jiggs Kalra's Prashad: Cooking with Indian Masters treated Indian chefs as named artists with their own kitchens and signatures, not an anonymous tradition passed down through vague ancestry (Kalra). K. T. Achaya's Indian Food: A Historical Companion went further back still, tracing jalebi to the Arabic zalabiya and khichri to Persian and Mughal courts, undoing the idea that either dish was ever purely indigenous (Achaya). David Burton's The Raj at Table ran the current in the other direction, showing how homesick British households built a new cuisine out of substitutions and misunderstandings, and how mulligatawny and kedgeree came out the other end as dishes nobody could fully claim (Burton).

Every one of these books was making the same argument in a different accent. Fusion did not arrive with a hyphenated menu term. It arrived with people.

The Nawabs Were Doing This Before It Was a Trend

Vikram Doctor's recent piece in The Economic Times makes the same case from outside my bookshelf, with none of the nostalgia attached (Doctor). He opens by asking whether fusion cooking is a culinary influencer's shortcut to attention, then spends the rest of the piece proving princely kitchens were running that experiment generations earlier.

Prakash Tandon, the first Indian manager hired by Lever Brothers, recalled a feast in Hyderabad that opened with a watery, disappointing soup, proof that royal kitchens absorbed European courses unevenly long before anyone called the result sophisticated (Doctor). Some states absorbed the assignment better than others. Rampur's khansamas built a repertoire of pulaos, biryanis, rogan josh and qormas that Tarana Hussain Khan documents in her book Degh to Dastarkhwan, shaped as much by ceremony as by appetite. Jaipur's royal kitchen produced a garlic clove curry served with jasmine flowers and a potato kheer, recipes Kumud Kanwar collected in Royal Cuisine of India. In Kathiawar, the kitchens of Gondal turned out a lamb curry built on lentils and onions, and a version of kheer made with mutton in place of rice pudding's usual sweetness (Doctor).

None of this traveled by accident.

Marriage did the moving. When a princess left one state for another, her cooks came with her, and so did her family's recipes, sweets and finishing touches. Gayatri Devi, born in Cooch Behar and married into Jaipur, carried this same cross-state fluency into her own cookbook, Gourmet's Gateway (Doctor). She was a case study in the very pattern Doctor was describing, decades before he wrote about it, and about fifteen years before she wrote back to a teenager asking about dessert.

What stays with me is not the recipes, most of which I have still never cooked. It is that a Maharani took the time to answer a stranger's letter about creme brulee. Fusion cooking, princely or otherwise, ran on people crossing borders before their ingredients did, and on someone generous enough to write back when a curious kid followed the trail.

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Works Cited

Achaya, K. T. Indian Food: A Historical Companion. Oxford University Press, 1994.

Burton, David. The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India. Faber and Faber, 1993.

Devi, Gayatri, and Santha Rama Rau. A Princess Remembers: The Memoirs of the Maharani of Jaipur. J. B. Lippincott, 1976.

Doctor, Vikram. "How India's Princely States Promoted Fusion Cooking." The Economic Times, 27 Sept. 2026, economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/how-indias-princely-states-promoted-fusion-cooking/articleshow/134364143.cms.

Kalra, J. Inder Singh. Prashad: Cooking with Indian Masters. Allied Publishers, 1986.

Singh, Digvijaya. Cooking Delights of the Maharajas: Exotic Dishes from the Princely House of Sailana. Vakils, Feffer and Simons, 1982.