Curry Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Lizzie Collingham

  Dedication

  Title

  List of Illustrations

  List of Maps

  List of Recipes

  Author’s Preface

  1: Chicken Tikka Masala: the quest for an authentic Indian meal

  2: Biryani: the Great Mughals

  3: Vindaloo: the Portuguese and the chilli pepper

  4: Korma: East India Company merchants, temples and the Nawabs of Lucknow

  5: Madras Curry: the British invention of curry

  6: Curry Powder: bringing India to Britain

  7: Cold Meat Cutlets: British food in India

  8: Chai: the great tea campaign

  9: Curry and Chips: Syhleti sailors and Indian takeaways

  10: Curry Travels the World

  Picture Section

  Notes

  Glossary

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  This imaginative book tells the history of India and its rulers through their food. It follows the story of curry as it spread from the courts of Delhi to the balti houses of Birmingham.

  Curry is the product of India’s long history of invasion. In the wake of the Mughal conquerors, an army of cooks brought Persian recipes to northern India; in the south, Portugese spice merchants introduced vinegar marinades and the chillies they had recently discovered in the New World; the British soon followed, with their passion for roast meat accompanied by cauliflowers and beans. When these new ingredients were mixed with native spices, they produced those disinctly Inidan dishes.

  Curry tells the story of an array of familar Indian dishes and the people who invented, discovered, cooked and ate them. Teeming with colourful characters, rich in anecdote and meticulously researched, Curry is vivid, entertaining and delicious.

  About the Author

  Lizzie Collingham taught history at the University of Warwick before becoming a Research Fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She is the author of Imperial Bodies: the physical experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947. Now a freelance scholar and writer, she has lived in Sweden, Germany, Australia and France, but is still looking for a place to settle.

  ALSO BY LIZZIE COLLINGHAM

  Imperial Bodies:

  the physical experience of the Raj, c. 1800–1947

  For Rebecca Earle

  LIZZIE COLLINGHAM

  Curry

  A TALE OF COOKS AND CONQUERORS

  List of Illustrations

  Illustrations in the text

  I: Bakers (Kashmir, 1850–60), Oriental and India Office Collections, Add.Or.1681

  II: View of the fortified city of Goa in 1509, showing the Portuguese war fleet in the East Indies (early 16th century), Oriental and India Office Collections, P859

  III: The Dutch factory at Surat in Pieter van den Broecke, Korte Historiael ende Journaelsche Aenteckyeninghe (Amsterdam, 1634), British Library, 10095.aaa.49

  IV: A gentleman’s khedmutgars, or table servants bringing in dinner in Charles D’Oyly, The European in India (London, 1813), plate VII, Oriental and India Office Collections, W625

  V: Advertisement for Empress Currie Powder in Joseph Edmunds, Curries and How to Prepare Them. Recipes by some of the most eminent chefs de cuisine, including E. Francatelli . . . and C. H. Senn (London, 1903)

  VI: Our Cook Room, George Franklin Atkinson, Curry and Rice on Forty Plates; or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India (2nd edn, London, 1859), Oriental and India Office Collections, W2868

  VII: Pathan labourers of the frontier area enjoying their afternoon tea (1920s), Bourne and Shepherd, Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 703/(5)

  VIII: Indian employees at Veeraswamy’s (1920s), private collection

  IX: The Taste of India restaurant in Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa (2001), private collection

  Colour sections

  1: A banquet including roast goose given to Babur by the Mirzas (1507), Oriental and India Office Collections, Or.3714, f.260b

  2: Harvesting of the almond crop at Kand-i-Badam Oriental and India Office Collections, Or.3714, f.6b

  3: Portuguese man reading a book held by a servant (c.1595), Oriental and India Office Collections. J.16,6

  4: Grain merchant in Pushkar (1999), private collection

  5: Sweet shop in northern India (1980s), private collection

  6: Nasir al-Din Haidar (King of Oudh, 1827–37) at dinner with a British official and wife (c.1831), Oriental and India Office Collections, Add.Or.2599

  7: Cooked food and kawab makers (Kashmir, 1850–60), Oriental and India Office Collections, Add.Or.1687

  8: Cook shop in northern India (1980s), private collection

  9: Frying puris (1996), Jeremy Horner/CORBIS

  10: Our burra khana in George Franklin Atkinson, Curry and Rice on Forty Plates; or the Ingredients of Social Life at “Our Station” in India (2nd edn, London, 1859), Oriental and India Office Collections, W2868

  11: The interior of the Governor-General’s travelling kitchen tent with numerous uniformed cooks engaged in cooking a meal (1820–21), Oriental and India Office Collections, Add.Or.4921

  12: A servant setting out a meal in camp (1930s), private collection

  13: Grinding curry stuff (Bangalore, 1901–4), Higginbothams, Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 494/(37)

  14: Kitchen servants (c.1880), W. W. Hooper, Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 447/3(56)

  15: The breakfast William Tayler, Sketches Illustrating the Manners and Customs of the Indians and Anglo-Indians (London, 1842), Oriental and India Office Collections, X42

  16: Delivering tiffin boxes in Bombay (1996), Catherine Karnow/CORBIS

  17: A dabba-wallah in New Delhi (1990s), private collection

  18: Packing tea for export (1901), Robert Arthur Ellis, Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 304/53

  19: Madras tea shop Edward Hilder Colebrook (1940), Oriental and India Office Collections, Photo 469/5 (44)

  20: Sadhu drinking tea in Pushkar (1990s), private collection

  21: Lovers’ picnic (1970s), private collection

  22: Anglo-Indian picnic (1930s), private collection

  23: Indian picnic (1980s), private collection

  24: Vegetable market in Pushkar (1990s), private collection

  25: Chicken seller in northern India (1980s), private collection

  26: A village store selling curry powder and corned beef on the island of Savai’i, Samoa (2001), private collection

  Endpapers

  The interior of Veeraswamy’s (1920s), private collection

  Picture credits

  The author and publishers are grateful for the following:

  Plates I, II, III, IV, VI, VII and 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 18, 19 by permission of the British Library. Plates 12, 22 Jana Howlett. Plates 5, 8, 23, 25 Olivier Mettery. Plates IX, 4, 17, 20, 24, 26 Thomas Seidel. Plate VIII Masala World Ltd. Plates 9, 16 Corbis.

  List of Maps

  Map 1: South Asia today

  Map 2: Persia, central Asia and Mughal India

  Map 3: Spice trading ports in Europe, India and south east Asia in the sixteenth century

  Map 4: European trading posts in India: The extent of the East India Company’s territory in 1804 and 1856

  Map 5: Bangladesh

  Maps drawn by Reginald Piggott

  List of Recipes

  Chicken tikka masala

  Kebabs

  Khichari

  Chicken biryani

  Green mango sherbet

  Vindaloo
/>   Bebinca

  Yash Muthanna’s appam

  Lamb korma

  Shammi kebabs

  Besan laddu

  Dhansak

  Green coriander chutney

  Bengali potatoes

  Spiced tea or masala chai

  Rebecca’s masala chai

  Lassi

  Mango buttermilk lassi

  Nimbu pani

  Susan’s chicken

  A note on the recipes.

  The recipes which readers might like to try are to be found at the end of each chapter. These are recipes which I use myself. I hope they will produce tasty results in your kitchen. Indians cooking in their own homes adjust the quantities of spices to suit their own tastes: some cooks use as many as twenty chillies when making a vindaloo, others just three or four. You should feel free to adjust the quantities to suit your preferences.

  An Indian friend from South Africa once gave me a helpful tip which has improved my Indian cookery: when frying onions, garlic, ginger or spices always wait until the raw smell of the foods has disappeared before going on to the next stage of the cooking process.

  I have also included some historical recipes in the body of the text to give a sense of what these recipes were like. Some of them might be interesting to cook, although I do not suggest experimenting with roast black rat.

  L.C.

  Author’s Preface

  In 1994 I drank my first lassi at Dipti’s Pure Drinks in the Colaba area of Bombay. Its thick, velvety sweetness was seductive. During my stay in the city I kept returning for more. I also ate my first vegetarian thali in a working-men’s eatery, and wondered about the state of the kitchens when a rat sat on my foot.

  At the home of John and Susan Gnanasundaram in Madras I discovered the delights of Indian home cooking: spongy idlis with freshly made, bright green, sharp coriander chutney for breakfast, and rich chicken curries for dinner. None of it tasted like the Indian food I was used to in British Indian restaurants.

  A few months later I became very ill with cholera. While I was recovering, I could only manage to eat tea and toast; I also discovered that tourist hotels still served the food of the Raj and I recuperated on a diet of yellow omelettes. It was when I was feeling better that I sampled mulligatawny soup at an expensive Delhi hotel restaurant, surrounded by the left-over trappings of the Raj – cane chairs and potted palms. The soup was sour and hot and I thought it was horrible. But my interest in the British relationship with Indian food was established.

  I returned to Britain and wrote my first book which was about the British body in India. It traced the changing way in which the British managed, disciplined and displayed their bodies as their position in India moved from commerce to control and imperialism. Part of this process was their rejection of Indian curries in favour of tinned salmon and bullety bottled peas.

  The British relationship with Indian food continued to capture my imagination and, while researching this book, I was surprised to discover that tea was probably the most important item of food or drink that the British bequeathed to India, hence my chapter on chai. Most of this book, however, is an exploration of the histories of many of the Indian dishes familiar to habitués of Indian restaurants. I trace their culinary roots, their discovery, or invention, by Europeans and the various ways in which they travelled back to Britain, and around the rest of the world. It is a biography of the curries of the Indian subcontinent, as defined by the nations of Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. (I have omitted Malaysian and Thai curries which carry with them a different history.)

  Lizzie Collingham,

  Montolieu,

  2005

  1

  Chicken Tikka Masala:

  the quest for an authentic Indian meal

  THE MENU OF the King Baba on Bath Street, Leamington Spa, includes jalfrezi, rogan josh, korma, dopiaza, dhansak, madras and vindaloo baltis. Aloo gobi, tarka dhal and nan bread are among the various side dishes. This catalogue of names conjures up images of dimly lit interiors; red-and-gold flock wallpaper; the aroma of fried onions; pilau rice with cheerful pink and green grains; poppadoms served with pickles and orange mango chutney in small stainless-steel bowls.

  On the same street in Leamington Spa there are a selection of cheap takeaways where the customers browse through the Daily Mirror while they wait for their curries. A two-course, takeaway balti meal can be bought for under five pounds.

  Curry houses are not the first things which spring to mind when Leamington Spa is mentioned. But it was, in fact, one of the first provincial English towns to have a selection of Indian restaurants. A visitor in 1975 enthused, ‘There are restaurants and delicatessens in a dozen national styles. Yams and tortillas, cabanos and cracowska, grappa and pitta bread can be found with ease . . . [this] is not the normal state of affairs in medium-sized English provincial towns; and to someone like me, who comes from a town where they have only just heard about green peppers, it makes Leamington seem like London and New York rolled into one compact sample-sized city . . . the existence of five Indian restaurants – as well as upwards of fifty other eating places – seems to suggest a level of luxury and extravagance to tempt the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah.’1 Leamington’s proximity to Coventry and Birmingham, where many of Britain’s Bangladeshi and Pakistani immigrants found work in the car industry, made it, where Indian food was concerned, one of Britain’s pioneering towns. It still is.

  On Victoria Terrace, not far from the King Baba, is the Five Rivers, an example of a new breed of Indian restaurant. In the Five Rivers the flock wallpaper has been exchanged for pale blue and white walls; spotlights have taken over from the dim lamps; tablecloths have given way to wooden tables and leather chairs with steel legs. The prices are higher, and the waiters trendy in white jeans and T-shirts and burgundy braces. The menu, too, is different. The Five Rivers promises its customers a journey ‘around all the great culinary cities of India’ with dishes ‘suited to our contemporary palates’, including Hyderabadi chicken korma and Amritsari fish.

  New-style Indian restaurants are opening up and down the country, and in London high-class restaurants such as Veeraswamy’s and Zaika are making a bid to elevate Indian food from its status in Britain as cheap nosh to an elegant cuisine, every bit as sophisticated as French cookery.

  The modern restaurants place great value on the authenticity of their food. Another new-style restaurant in Leamington Spa claims that all the dishes are prepared in our ‘own kitchen exactly as in our own home’. At really expensive restaurants, the chefs are often specially trained in India and cook only dishes from their home region. Even the more traditional restaurants are beginning to advertise their dishes as ‘authentic’. Supermarkets offer an ‘authentic’ Indian experience with every ready-prepared Indian meal. But what does authenticity really mean? And is authenticity really the right yardstick by which to judge an Indian meal?

  No sooner had the then Foreign Minister Robin Cook announced chicken tikka masala as the new national dish of Great Britain in 2001 than food critics were condemning it as a British invention. Chicken tikka masala, they sneered, was not a shining example of British multiculturalism but a demonstration of the British facility for reducing all foreign foods to their most unappetising and inedible form.2 Rather than the inspired invention of an enterprising Indian chef, this offensive dish was dismissed as the result of an ignorant customer’s complaint that his chicken tikka was too dry. When the chef whipped together a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, some cream and a few spices to provide a gravy for the offending chicken, he produced a mongrel dish of which, to their shame, Britons now eat at least eighteen tonnes a week.

  Chicken tikka masala’s most heinous crime, according to its critics, is not so much that it tastes horrid but that it is not authentic.3 In fact, journalists report with glee that none of the curries we eat in old-style British curry houses is authentic, not to mention the fact that the ‘Indian’ food they serve is cooked by Bangladeshis.
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  The majority of Indian restaurant owners in Britain do indeed come from Bangladesh. However, for much of the period that this book covers, Bangladesh, like Pakistan and Sri Lanka, belonged to a broader food world which can be termed Indian. It was not until 1947 that Pakistan became a nation; Sri Lanka followed in 1948, and Bangladesh split from Pakistan in 1971. Food on the Indian subcontinent does not divide into different culinary styles and dishes along these relatively new national boundaries so much as along much older regional boundaries. The food of Bangladesh belongs to the culinary world of Bengal. Punjabis share a food culture although their region was split in two with the creation of Pakistan. These are just two of the many culinary regions on the Indian subcontinent.

  In fact, the food of people from one region of India is sometimes unrecognisable as Indian food to someone from another. Satya, a villager from the Punjab, arrived in Delhi in the 1950s. She had never travelled outside the Punjab before and she found the customs of the other people living in her apartment building strange and fascinating. She noted with astonishment that the Madrassi family ‘preferred rice with their food, not chapatties like our Punjabi folk. Whatever vegetables they prepare – lentils, aubergines, tomatoes – they must have rice to go with them. Then they scrape it all up in balls with their fingers so that the juice runs down their forearms, not neatly with a piece of chapatti or a spoon. So one day I said . . . “Look, why don’t you eat like we do? After all, you are people of good family. Surely where you come from people don’t eat like that?”’ The neighbour ‘was very offended and abused me roundly, when I had only meant to tell her nicely that we didn’t like to watch such messy eating’.4 The outraged Madrassi might well have retorted that while her food might be sloppy and messy to eat, at least it wasn’t heavy and greasy like the Punjabi food Satya and her family ate. If the women ever recovered their friendship, they might well have united in condemning their Gujarati neighbours for their penchant for sickly sweet food, their Bengali neighbours for filling the place with the reek of mustard oil, and their Telugu neighbours for producing meals that were unbearably hot.5