7 Ingredients That Travelled The Silk Routes Into Indian Kitchens

What does the Silk Route have to do with what is in your kitchen today? Quite a lot, although the answer is more complicated than a straight line on a map. The Silk Roads were never a single road running from China to Europe, but a shifting network of land and maritime routes connecting the Indian subcontinent with Central Asia, West Asia and beyond. In the Indian context, some of these connections ran through Kashmir, Gilgit and the Karakoram, while others linked the subcontinent with Afghanistan and major Central Asian centres around Balkh. Food travelled too, alongside textiles, spices, plants and other goods. Some ingredients were deliberately cultivated after they arrived, some were transported in dried form because they survived long journeys better, and some were already present in India by the time the better-documented Silk Roads flourished. That makes their stories less about a single moment of arrival and more about how ingredients moved, were traded and eventually found a place in Indian food.

Asafoetida: From Afghanistan To The Indian Tempering Pan

Take hing. Asafoetida is perhaps one of the clearest examples of an imported ingredient becoming completely at home in Indian cooking. The pungent resin is obtained from Ferula species that mainly grow in Afghanistan and Iran, rather than through commercial cultivation in India, which has historically depended on imports. The Kashyapa Samhita, an early Ayurvedic medical text, is often cited as recording asafoetida as an import from Afghanistan, suggesting that the ingredient was entering India through established trade networks long before it became associated with the everyday tempering of dals, vegetables and other dishes. By the 12th century, it was established enough to appear in Manasollasa, a courtly compendium from the Western Chalukya period, in a recipe combining fish with cardamom, rock salt, pepper and asafoetida. A few centuries later, the Portuguese physician Garcia de Orta observed that Hindus who could afford it, particularly wealthy vegetarians and Brahmins, bought asafoetida for their food. From an ingredient crossing into India as a traded resin, hing had become part of local culinary practice and food preference.

Pistachio: A Central Asian Nut At The Delhi Sultanate Table

Pistachio takes us further into the world of Central Asian produce. The cultivated pistachio, Pistacia vera, is associated with the dry landscapes of Central Asia and adjoining parts of Iran and Afghanistan, regions linked to the wider overland trading networks that connected with the Indian subcontinent. Its place in northern Indian food is documented by the 14th century, when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta described meals at the court of Delhi Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq. One of the dishes he encountered was samusak, a pastry filled with minced meat cooked with almonds, walnuts, pistachios, onions and spices before being fried in ghee. So the pistachio was not merely a dry fruit being eaten on its own; it was already being incorporated into prepared dishes in the Delhi Sultanate. By Akbar’s reign, the Ain-i-Akbari listed pistachios among its categories of Turani fruit and recorded their market price alongside almonds, raisins and dried apricots. The nut’s journey into Indian cuisine, then, is also a story about the food preferences and trade connections of northern India’s courts.

Apricot: An Ancient Journey Through Central Asia

Apricot complicates the familiar idea of the Silk Route because its journey into South Asia appears to have begun much earlier. Research shows that cultivated apricot originated in China and identifies its appearance in Kashmir during the second millennium BCE, making the fruit’s movement across Asia far older than the historical Silk Roads usually associated with the term. Researchers have suggested several possible mechanisms for this movement, including exchanges between communities along the Inner Asia Mountain Corridor and the transportation of dried fruit through what they describe as a possible proto-Silk Road. What is clearer is that by the Mughal period, dried apricots were firmly part of northern India’s long-distance fruit trade. The Ain-i-Akbari lists khubani, or dried apricots, alongside raisins, almonds, pistachios and other fruits moving through the region. A fruit that had crossed Asia in antiquity was by then part of a much larger network of cultivation, preservation and trade.

Almond: From Central And West Asia To Mughal Kitchens

The almond has an equally long and complicated history. Recent genomic research identifies distinct cultivated almond populations in Central Asia, the Caucasus and the Middle East, while earlier molecular studies describe Western and Central Asia as the broader centre from which cultivated almonds spread through ancient trade networks. That does not, however, mean we can attach a single date to the almond’s arrival in India. A frequently repeated claim says that Persian settlers introduced almond cultivation to Kashmir in the 16th century, but this is better understood as a claim about the establishment or expansion of cultivation rather than proof that almonds had never reached the subcontinent before that period. Ibn Battuta’s account of a Delhi Sultanate meal already mentions almond paste and almonds in samusak in the 14th century. By the Mughal period, the Ain-i-Akbari placed almonds among the Turani fruits available in India. Its history therefore sits somewhere between cultivation and commerce: almonds could arrive through trade long before particular regions began producing them more extensively themselves.

Raisins: When Grapes Became A Trade Commodity

Raisins show how preservation could make an ingredient much easier to move across long distances. Fresh grapes are fragile and seasonal, but once dried, they become a durable commodity that can travel with caravans overland. The Ain-i-Akbari records several forms of dried grape, including ordinary raisins, large raisins, munaqqa and, notably, “Qandahar dry grapes”, alongside dried apricots, almonds and pistachios. The same section records grapes and other fruit arriving from Kabul, as well as melons and apples from Samarqand, offering a picture of Central Asian produce reaching the Mughal court through a functioning supply network rather than as occasional curiosities. Kandahar itself was an important commercial entrepôt between the Indo-Persian worlds, with caravans carrying goods between India, Persia and Central Asian markets. In the case of raisins, the Silk Routes were therefore not simply moving a fruit from one place to another. They were also creating the conditions under which a highly perishable crop could become a reliable food commodity hundreds of miles from where it was grown.

Melons: The Fruit Babur Missed From Home

Few foods give us as intimate a glimpse of migration and memory as the melon in Babur’s memoir. Babur, the founder of the Mughal dynasty, had grown up in Central Asia and regarded its melons as one of the tastes of home. When he ate a melon in Hindustan, he wrote that he was so overcome with homesickness that he wept while eating it. The fruit mattered enough to him that he also tried to transplant Central Asian melons into India, although these efforts had limited horticultural success during his lifetime. By Akbar’s reign, the imperial Ain-i-Akbari was recording different grades of Kabul and other Turani melons while distinguishing them from melons grown in Hindustan. That distinction tells us something important about the movement of food: imported varieties did not simply replace local produce, and attempts to reproduce familiar foods in a new environment could be as significant as the trade itself. 

Saffron: The Ingredient That Complicates The Silk Route Story

Saffron sounds like an obvious Silk Route ingredient, especially when we think of the culinary connections between Persia, Central Asia and Kashmir. But its Indian history is precisely why it is better treated with caution. Rajatarangini, the 12th-century chronicle of Kashmir written by Kalhana, indicates that saffron was already being used in Kashmir before the reign of King Lalitaditya in the 8th century. Modern scholarship, however, notes that the exact date and mechanism of saffron’s introduction into Kashmir remains unknown. That means the often-repeated claim that Persian traders simply brought saffron to Kashmir cannot be presented as established fact. What we do know is that saffron later became an important high-value ingredient in elite Indian food culture: the Ain-i-Akbari records substantial quantities of saffron being used in food, while descriptions of Mughal court and fruit culture place it among other prized ingredients. 

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