India, May 3 -- If we are to assess the culinary and gastronomic legacies of the Mughals, we must begin by dispelling two myths. The first is that today's so-called Mughlai food is authentic: it really has nothing to do with the Mughal empire, and no self-respecting emperor would have deigned to eat it. Over the past few decades, the term has come to be associated with greasy meat- and chicken-based dishes. Few, if any, of these existed in any form during Mughal reign, and though the term "Mughlai" is now a byword for "Muslim", some of these dishes were created decades after the last of the Mughals were gone, by Punjabi Hindu chefs. For instance, butter chicken, that staple of the "Mughlai" menu, was created not in the 1600s or 1800s but in...