IN 1824 FANNY PARKS and her husband, a civil servant in the service of the East India Company, invited some friends to dinner. Despite the fact that they were a ‘small party of eight . . . including ourselves . . . two-and-twenty servants were in attendance! Each gentleman,’ she wrote, ‘takes his own servant or servants, in number from one to six, each lady her attendant or attendants, as it pleases her fancy.’ Thomas Williamson’s handbook to Indian life, written as a Guide to Gentlemen Intended for the Civil, Military or Naval Service of the Honourable East India Company in 1810, informed the novice that the aub-dar (water cooler) would generally arrive at the house well before the party began, to ensure that the water, champagne, Madeira, claret or pale ale were all well chilled. In Calcutta, the host could be expected to possess sufficient china and silverware to set the table but Williamson noted that ‘at all military stations, each guest sends his servant’ with ‘two plates, a soup plate, a small bowl for bones &c., a tumbler, a glass for Madeira, [various cutlery] . . . and a napkin’. At the dinner, the servants, ‘delicately dressed all in white muslins and white or figured turbans and large gold earrings’ would stand behind the chairs of their masters attending to their needs. The khansaman (butler) would change the plates and hand round the dishes; another more menial servant might employ a small chowrie (fan) of peacock’s feathers to beat away the flies.
Underlying the noise of clinking dishes and conversation would be the hiss and bubble of the hookahs. Fanny Parks noted that ‘the Hooqû was very commonly smoked at that time in Calcutta: before dinner was finished, every man’s pipe was behind his chair’. Crouching beside each chair were the hookah burdars who attended to the tobacco and the functioning of the pipe. What with the hot Indian climate, ‘the steam of the dishes, the heat of the lamps, and the crowd of attendants’, the atmosphere could be oppressive. Matters were made worse by the disagreeable smell of coconut oil which the servants rubbed into their skin. If you had the misfortune of sitting next to a man from the Mofussil (remote countryside), then the fumes from the spices his ‘country’ servants used to prepare the tobacco for his hookah could also be unpleasant. Other, less happy reminders that the dinner party was being held in India were the insects and the dust. Fanny Parks was too genteel to refer to such things but Thomas Williamson jovially mentioned that ‘the alighting of cock-roaches on the face while at table’ was simply a matter of course which one had to put up with. He did acknowledge that ‘the number of flies at times found in the sauces will occasion a disposition to enquire how they got there, and whence they came!’ But flies could be picked out of the food. On the whole he seems to have found the ‘shoals of dust which skim during the middle of the day’ far more annoying as they were likely to ‘render the whole dinner unacceptable’. Efforts were made to relieve the heat with punkahs. Fanny described these as ‘monstrous’ fans made of ‘a wooden frame covered with cloth, some 10, 20 or 30 or more feet long, suspended from the ceiling of a room, and moved to and fro by a man outside by means of a rope and pulleys, and a hole in the wall through which the rope passes’. Despite the breeze they provided, there were frequent complaints that it was ‘scarcely . . . possible to sit out the melancholy ceremony of an Indian dinner’.1
Now that the East India Company was the de facto ruler of large tracts of India, the factories at Madras, Bombay and Calcutta expanded into proper towns, from which British power radiated out into the rest of India. By 1800, the company employed 681 civil servants who replaced the old Mughal administrators. They collected revenue and administered justice in the Indian courts. Fanny Parks was one of a tiny number of women who accompanied their husbands out to India. As the company conquered more territory they needed an ever larger army. Indian sepoys were supplemented by British troops directly recruited by the company, and by regiments from the British or Queen’s army which were sent on tours of duty in India. Thus, by the turn of the century there were 20–30,000 British soldiers in India. This meant that the presidency towns, as they were known, were now home to sizeable British communities.
The scruffy thatched bungalows huddled around the factory of Fort William, which had confronted the new arrival in Calcutta in the seventeenth century, had been replaced by a town of ‘Greek-like pillared mansions’ and churches, all laid out in elegant wide streets and squares with ‘the superb colonnaded and domed residence of the Governor-General of India’ dominating over it all.2 In the cool of the evenings the dusty parade ground, known as the maidan, was crowded with British gentlemen taking the air on horseback and a scattering of ladies in tonjons (open carriages, carried by four to six bearers on long poles). If it had not been for the Indian shacks in the background, the adjutant storks gloomily surveying the scene from the rooftops, and the numerous Indian servants and hawkers milling about, the stranger might have thought he had arrived in Jane Austen’s Bath. Indeed, Frederick Shore arriving in Calcutta in November 1818, aged nineteen, found the society very much like that of ‘a country Town in England’.
Frederick Shore began his career as a civil servant by spending a year at Fort William College dutifully studying Persian and Hindustani and attending lectures on religion and good government. In a letter he wrote to his aunt back in England, he assured her that he did not ‘wish to have a name among the idle ones of this place of which there are a good many’. Calcutta boasted all the temptations of an English town. There were European shops selling ‘liquors of all kinds, guns, pistols, glass ware . . . crockery, stationery, shoes and boots, hosiery, grocery and an infinity of articles’ on which a young man could waste his money. There were taverns, some where he might respectably hold a dinner for his friends, and others where he was likely to fall prey to inebriety and the charms of ‘sable beauties’. There were pleasure gardens and assembly rooms where young men could dance and flirt pleasurably with young ladies who had come out, as Shore put it, ‘for the [marriage] market’. Shore avoided dancing – he did not wish to become ensnared in marriage before he could afford it. Nor did he indulge in gambling at cards or at the races, two of the pursuits most favoured by young recruits. He was aghast at the foolhardiness of those ‘mad’ young men who bought sixteen horses, bet on them crazily and ruined their prospects for ever.
At all their settlements, even the remote military cantonments in the Indian countryside, the British created a simulacrum of British society. But their little Englands in India were always fragile, as India insinuated itself into every aspect of daily life. British racial and cultural arrogance meant that they set out to shape Indian society and culture to their own ends. However, they discovered, just as the Mughals had done before them, that India’s impact on the culture of its rulers was inescapable. At first the British were fairly unconcerned by this and to some extent they embraced India and allowed it to become an integral part of their identities. Indeed, East India Company officials referred to themselves as Indians, East Indians or Anglo-Indians. The latter name stuck and throughout this book Anglo-Indian is used to refer to the British in India. It was only in 1911 that the meaning of the term changed and it was used to describe the people of mixed British and Indian parentage, who until then were known as Eurasians.
Besides enthusiastically adopting the Indian hookah, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, company officials smoked the Indian form of cannabis known as bhang, drank arrack, interlarded their conversations with Indian words like ‘pukka’ (proper) and ‘bundobust’ (contract), took regular shower baths, adopted lightweight nankeen jackets and white linen waistcoats and sometimes even wore Indian-style loose pyjamas, which were more comfortable in the heat. Indeed, they allowed India to get under their skins and were transformed into hybrid figures, neither British nor Indian but a blend of the two.
The scarcity of European women meant that many British men lived with Indian mistresses, in semi-Indian style. These unions were not heartless matters of convenience, many men were deeply attached to their consorts and whiled away their leisure hours in the purdah quarters of their compounds. Such intimate contact with Indian women educated the British in the ‘syntaxes of native life’ and the women taught their partners the local language and customs, and how to enjoy Indian food.3 The children of these unions also created an enduring bond between the company servants and India. The fact that their lifestyle lent British society in India a rakish, slightly dissolute air seems not to have perturbed the majority of company officials.
In fact, in the early days of company rule in India the British administrators actively set about constructing themselves as a new Indian aristocracy. The British were conscious of the fact that although they had replaced the Mughals as the ruling elite, in the eyes of their Indian subjects they were still low-class traders. They therefore concentrated on projecting an image of themselves as an impressive ruling class. The Reverend James Cordiner, who visited India in the 1820s noted that ‘all classes of society here live sumptuously and many individuals expend from 2 to 10,000 pounds each annually, in maintaining their households’. In Britain this level of expenditure would have been beyond the means of any but the wealthiest levels of the upper classes. Even if the figure is an exaggeration, it was true that in India the sons of ordinary middle-class commercial families, and of the declining British gentry, were able to live like aristocrats. If James Munro Macnabb had remained in the Lowlands of Scotland, where he was born, he might have expected to earn between £500 and £1,000 a year as a minister or doctor. He would have been able to afford between four and six servants, and might have spent between £20 and £30 a month on his table.4 In Calcutta, where he was Acting Mint Master and Magistrate of the City, he lived in ‘an excellent three-storied house . . . attached to the Mint’, employed ten bearers to carry him about town in his palanquin (a coffin-like box in which the passenger reclined and which was carried on poles by four to six bearers) and two hurkarrahs to run in front carrying silver sticks, which were marks of status. He also owned a coach and employed a coachman, as well as six syces (grooms) to care for the horses. Dining and entertaining were central to maintaining his place in Calcutta society, and a high proportion of the forty-one servants he employed were associated with the table. Apart from a cook, a cook’s mate, and a masalchi (spice grinder and dish-washer), James Macnabb employed a khansaman and a second butler to wait at table, assisted by an aubdar and a khidmutgar (waiter). He spent 400 rupees, or approximately £55, a month on food bought at the bazaar, as well as bread, butter, wood for the kitchen fire and wine and beer. This was a princely sum which ensured that his table would always have been well supplied with ‘delicious salt humps, brisket and tongues . . . superb curry and mulligatawny soup’.5
The burra khana (big dinner) was the focus of Anglo-Indian social life. It was on their dinner tables that the British in India most extravagantly displayed their wealth and status. Amazed commentators remarked that there was always so much food ‘that no part of the table-cloth remains uncovered’.6 ‘The receipt for an Indian dinner appears to be, to slaughter a bullock and a sheep, and place all the joints before the guest at once, with poultry &c. to match,’ wrote the ever-critical Emma Roberts. She was in India as the companion to her married sister, a position which she described as one of unmitigated ennui, which perhaps accounts for her persistently disgruntled tone.7
East India Company merchants had brought the eating habits of the British squirarchy with them to India. In Britain, a gentleman might consume as much as seventy-four kilograms of meat a year (compared to the average amount of about forty), one or two reaching the incredible weight of forty stone. The diet of fashionable society was reflected in caricatures of the time which featured obese and gouty men.8 Tables piled high with huge meat pies, saddles of mutton and enormous hams were vivid demonstrations of the upper class’s ability to command vast quantities of a scarce resource. Anglo-Indians gained a reputation for consuming immense amounts of meat, in contrast to the vegetarian Indians, and even the meat-eating Mughal nobility. Once the British were established in India, they continued to replicate the consumption patterns of the wealthy at home and loaded their tables with ‘Turkies that you could not see over – round of Beef, boiled roast Beef, stewed Beef, loin of Veal for a side dish and roast big capons as large as Hen Turkies’. Large bowls of curry and rice were placed along the table, in between the turkeys and beef. This was just the first course. After the outsized joints had been cleared, a second course of beef steaks, pigeon pies, chicken drumsticks, more curry and rice, ‘quails and ortolans . . . piled up in hecatombs’, fruit and nuts, was placed on the table.9
Moreover, East India Company officials sat down to a table thus burdened with food twice a day. Frederick Shore was disgusted. He described to his sister Anna the ‘absurd, universal practice in this country, viz. to eat a tiffin as it is called, though it is nothing more or less than a regular dinner, at 3 o’clock after which they sit down to another dinner in the evening though they cannot eat anything, yet there is always a tolerable portion of wine and beer drank, the doing of which twice daily cannot be very conducive to health’.10 An army captain confirmed Shore’s impression and noted that due to eating too much at tiffin most people ‘only go through the form of dining; . . . condescend[ing] to taste some Yorkshire ham, coast mutton . . . hot curry and English cheese’. It was impossible for the diners to consume all that was set before them. In Calcutta, poor Christians were given the leftovers, but elsewhere the food had to be thrown away. Only the lowest caste of Indians would consider eating unclean British leftovers and in the Indian climate it was difficult to keep the food for the next day. Thus, burra khanas engendered an extravagant level of waste.
The servants were invariably blamed. The Reverend Cordiner complained that Indians ‘estimat[ed] the goodness of a dinner by the quantity which they crowd upon the board’. Emma Roberts acknowledged that ‘the servants would be ready to expire with shame at their master’s disgrace’ if the number of dishes were reduced, or smaller joints of meat were chosen, although she also blamed the Anglo-Indians’ lack of elegance and refinement for the vulgar splendour of the burra khana. Indian servants certainly collaborated with their masters’ and mistresses’ efforts to display their wealth on their tables. The status of their employers had a direct effect on the servants’ own standing in the Indian social world. During dinner parties the silent, and apparently subservient, servants of the guests were in fact quietly assessing the display of wealth on the table and ranking their colleagues accordingly. Elizabeth Gwillim, the wife of a judge at Madras, noted that her servants took ‘great pride in setting out the dinner’. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s ‘plate and figurines were just to their taste’. ‘I am glad I brought our China dessert set,’ she wrote, ‘both that and my Wedgwood have been admired beyond everything.’
Elizabeth did discover that the servants’ pride in the dining arrangements could have certain drawbacks. For one particular occasion she was pleased to have obtained a hare and she carefully instructed her cook on how to prepare it. During the evening the hare failed to appear on the dining table and when she ordered her butler to fetch it he ignored her. Afterwards, when she asked for an explanation, ‘he said he was very sorry but the cook and he had both agreed that all the company would laugh if a country hare was brought to so handsome a dinner . . . I believe [they] are perfectly convinced that it is from stinginess that I order them and I have never so far prevailed as to have one for company’. Hares were cheaper than rabbits and therefore considered inferior. Elizabeth was sufficiently good-humoured to simply laugh at her servants’ ‘extraordinary notions of grandeur’.
The Gwillims continually ran into the distinction their servants made between high- and low-status foodstuffs. They both particularly liked fish and Elizabeth would often take a trip down to the beach when the fishermen were bringing in their catch. Here she came across all sorts of fish she had never encountered before and she and her husband would try them for supper. But many of their favourite dishes, such as the tiny whitebait-like fish which the Indians fried whole, were never served at other British dining tables. Her servants explained: ‘Gentlemen cannot eat that fish.’ ‘Then we ask them if they can eat it, yes they say, black people very much like that but gentlemen can’t eat, no custom to bring gentlemen.’ Their servants served the British with the food of the previous ruling class: the Mughlai pilaus and ‘dum poked’ chickens that the company merchants had eaten at Surat. These were the high-status dishes familiar to the Muslim cooks the Anglo-Indians usually employed.11
What the British in India ate, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, was curry and rice.12 Anglo-Indian dining tables were not complete without bowls of curry which, eaten like a hot pickle or a spicy ragout, added bite to the rather bland flavours of boiled and roasted meats. No Indian, however, would have referred to his or her food as a curry. The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names and their servants would have served the British with dishes which they called, for example, rogan josh, dopiaza or quarama. But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.
The British learned this term from the Portuguese who described as ‘caril’ or ‘carree’ the ‘broths’ which the Indians ‘made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts . . . and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger . . . besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments [which they] . . . poured in good quantity upon . . . boyl’d Rice’.13 The Portuguese had adopted these terms from various words in south Indian languages. In Kannadan and Malayalam, the word karil was used to describe spices for seasoning as well as dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat. In Tamil, the word kari had a similar meaning (although nowadays it is used to mean sauce or gravy). As the words karil and kari were reconfigured into Portuguese and English they were transformed into ‘caril’ and ‘carree’ and eventually into the word curry which the British then used as a generic term for any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy in every part of India.14
Although they used the word curry to describe dishes from every Indian region, the British were aware of regional differences in the cooking of the subcontinent. In his cookery book on Curries and How to Prepare Them (1903), Joseph Edmunds stated decisively that ‘in India there are at least three separate classes of curry, the Bengal, the Madras and the Bombay’. Most cookery books also incorporated two other types of curry from outside India’s borders and gave recipes for Ceylon and Melay (Malayan) curries. The Anglo-Indian understanding of regional differences was, however, rather blunt. They tended to home in on distinctive, but not necessarily ubiquitous, features of a region’s cookery and then steadfastly apply these characteristics to every curry which came under that heading. ‘The Bengal artist,’ wrote Edmunds, ‘is greatest in fish and vegetable curries. Bombay boasts of its peculiar gifts in its bomelon fish and its popedoms.’15 Ceylon curries were usually piquant with chillies and made with coconut milk.
These broad categorisations missed out much of the subtle variety of dishes within each region and the strong sense among Indians of local, often minute, differences in food. Even within one region the variations in soil, water and air from one locality to another are thought to produce subtle distinctions in the taste of the grains, vegetables and grazing animals. Thus Punjabis ‘in a strange part of the Punjab [regard themselves] . . . as exiles, and comment on the air, water, milk, vegetables, the size and sweetness of cabbages and cauliflowers, dialect and everything else as not being quite what [they are] used to’.16 Tiny differences in the way basic foodstuffs are prepared, which may seem irrelevant to an outsider, are of great significance to Indians who pay close attention to the nuances of food. When south Kanarese villagers are asked how they differ from the people living in the neighbouring villages they will often respond by explaining ‘they eat . . . raw rice’ and ‘we eat parboiled rice’.17
The British insensitivity to these details was matched by their hazy awareness of the endless variations in flavour which were achieved by adding spices to the food in different combinations and at different stages in the cooking process. This was partly the result of the fact that Indian cooks gradually altered and simplified their recipes to suit British tastes. For example, Lucknavi quaramas were transformed into Anglo-Indian ‘quoremas’ or ‘kormas’, which were different in substance as well as name. A ‘thirty-five years’ resident’ of India who wrote an Indian cookery book explained that korma ‘without exception, is one of the richest of Hindoostanee curries, but it is quite unsuited to European taste, if made according to the original recipe’. He gave both the original and a diluted British version of the curry. The latter greatly reduced the amount of ghee and yogurt, as well as the aromatic spices such as the cloves and cardamom. It omitted the cream altogether and, instead, produced a more generic curry sauce by adding coriander, ginger and peppercorns which were basic ingredients in a British curry.
The original recipe: –
Take two pounds of mutton, one pound of tyre or dhye [yogurt], two chittacks of garlic, one dam of cardamoms, four chittacks of bruised almonds, four mashas of saffron, the juice of five lemons, one pound of ghee, four chittacks of sliced onions, one dam of cloves, one chittack of pepper, four chittacks of cream, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground garlic.
The following is the recipe of the quorema curry usually put on a gentleman’s table: –
Two chittacks and a half or five ounces of ghee, one cup or eight ounces of good thick tyre, one teaspoonful of ground chillies, four teaspoonsful of ground onions, one teaspoonful of coriander seed, six small sticks of ground cinnamon, two or three blades of lemon-grass, one teaspoonful and a half of salt, a half a teaspoonful of ground ginger, a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground garlic, eight or ten peppercorns, four or five ground cloves, five or six ground cardamoms, two or three bay leaves, a quarter of a cup of water, the juice of one lemon, and twelve large onions cut lengthways into fine slices.
Take two pounds of good fat mutton, and cut it into pieces nearly one inch and a half square. Warm the ghee, fry in it the sliced onions, and set aside; then fry all the ground condiments including the ground hot spices. When quite brown, throw in the mutton and salt, and allow the whole to brown, after which add the tyre, the hot spices with peppercorns and bay leaves, the lemon-grass, the water, and the fried onions, finely chopped; close the pot and allow to simmer for about an hour and a half or two hours, by which time the kurma will be quite ready. The blades of lemon-grass are never dished up.18
Curry became not just a term which the British used to describe an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts, but a dish in its own right, created for the British in India. One surgeon described curry as ‘a most heterogeneous compound of ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, cardamoms, coriander, Cayenne pepper, onions, garlic, and turmeric, ground to a powder by a pestle and mortar, made into a paste by ghee, . . . and added to a stewed kid or fowl’.19 And this was the formula which provided a template for Anglo-Indian curries, most of which were variations on this basic recipe. The Madras curry epitomised this attitude towards Indian food. It was simply a spicy sauce for meat, made from a spoonful of curry powder, some onions and tomatoes. Joseph Edmunds described it as ‘the high old curry made perfect’.
Cut a part of a neck of mutton into small pieces, taking out the bones; fry in its own fat until brown. Let it stew for two hours in some water or good stock. Add some fried onion, pepper and salt to taste, season it, and a few minutes before serving put a tablespoonful of curry-powder on the meat, mixing well, letting it simmer for about five minutes.20
Although it lacked sophistication, Anglo-Indian cookery was the first truly pan-Indian cuisine. Mughlai cuisine never became an all-India phenomenon: the culinary styles of many Indian regions were not incorporated into the repertoire and its spread was limited. In contrast, the British adopted recipes, ingredients, techniques and garnishes from all over the subcontinent and combined them in a coherent repertoire of dishes. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Anglo-Indian cookery was its tendency to apply appealing aspects of particular regional dishes to all sorts of curry. In this way, mangoes, which were sometimes added to fish curries in parts of the southern coastal areas, found their way into Bengali prawn curries; coconut was added to Mughlai dishes, where it was an alien ingredient. In a similar fashion, Anglo-Indians applied the variety of relishes and garnishes which they discovered in India with indiscriminate enthusiasm to all their curries. Served alongside bowls of curry and rice would be little plates of the Persian garnish of chopped hard-boiled eggs, Punjabi lemon pickles, south Indian finely sliced raw onions, desiccated coconut, neat piles of poppadoms, as well as fried onions and shreds of crispy bacon.21 The Anglo-Indian passion for garnishes was also applied to the simple rice and lentil dish khichari, the ordinary food of the majority of the population, and a favourite dish with the Mughal emperors on their fast days. Khichari was frequently served for breakfast in Anglo-Indian households. It went well with fish, which was another breakfast item, as ‘in the hot season, fish caught early in the morning would be much deteriorated before the dinner hour’.22 The favoured garnishes were hard-boiled eggs and fried onions, and eventually all three (fish, eggs and onions) came to be seen as essential to a good kedgeree.
Cold cooked fish (flaky fish preferable)
Cooked Patna rice
Butter
Chopped onions
A finely sliced clove of garlic
Ground turmeric
Hard-boiled eggs
Pepper
Salt
Green or red chillies
Cook in sufficient butter for a few minutes (but do not brown) the onions and garlic. Then add a teaspoonful of ground turmeric, and cook this mixture for a few minutes longer.
The rice and flaked fish is now added and the whole very lightly tossed together until warmed through. Pepper and salt to taste.
Serve piled on a dish garnished with slices of hard-boiled eggs and green and red chillies cut lengthwise.23
One of the most popular Anglo-Indian dishes is said to have been invented in Madras. The British are supposed to have asked their cooks to prepare soup as a starter, a concept unfamiliar to Indians who place all the dishes on the table at once and who pour liquid dishes over rice. The nearest thing to a soup that Madrassi cooks knew was a watery rasam (broth) made from black pepper or chillies, tamarind and water which in Tamil is called molo tunny, or pepper water. Ayurvedic physicians considered pepper water ‘one of the great blessings which God has bestowed upon the world’ and prescribed it for intermittent fever, haemorrhoids, dyspepsia and cholera. It is still served to people recovering from a stomach upset in south India today, and a rasam of this kind is often poured over rice as a digestive. The Madrassi cooks inventively added a little rice, a few vegetables, some meat, and transformed this broth into mulligatawny soup. Anglo-Indians in Madras were said to imbibe such large quantities of it that they were known as ‘Mulls’.24 Mulligatawny soup was one of the earliest dishes to emerge from the new hybrid cuisine which the British developed in India, combining British concepts of how food should be presented (as soups or stews, etc.) and Indian recipes. It quickly spread to the other British settlements dotted around the subcontinent and ‘very hot mulligatani soup’ was invariably served at every Anglo-Indian dinner party and ball.25
Cut a Chicken into 12 or 16 pieces, and boil it in two teacups of water. Take five or six corns of black pepper, ⅛ of an ounce each of turmeric, and fresh ginger, five or six slices of garlic and a dessert-spoon of raw coriander, with one red chilly, and grind them all together to make a fine paste. Mix the ground paste with the chicken broth and let it boil. After boiling, strain the gravy through a piece of muslin; warm a heaped tea-spoon of ghee in a stewpan, and fry a sliced onion, put in the meat and gravy together, stir and allow the curry to boil. Put no acid in the curry, serve it with a sour Lime cut in slices in a separate plate.
Just as the British in Madras discovered molo tunny, the British in Bombay developed a liking for their region’s specialities. Bomelon were small fish which the residents of Bombay treated with asafoetida and then hung up to dry in the sun. Fried until they were golden brown and crumbled over food they imparted a strong salty taste which the British adored. They christened this seasoning Bombay duck as these fish were known to swim close to the surface of the water. As early as the seventeenth century, the British living at Bombay were known as ‘Ducks’ due to their fondness for this delicacy.26 The residents of the Bombay area also ate papads. These were thin fried discs of a paste made from ground and roasted lentils. They were used like bread as a side dish with the meal. The British called them poppadoms.
In the seventh and eighth centuries, fire-worshipping Zoroastrians had fled the Arab invasion of Persia and settled along the west coast of India. The Parsees, as they were known, adapted to their new surroundings, adopting many Indian habits. When the Europeans began to arrive, they adapted again, learned English, moved into shipping and grew wealthy from the China trade. The East India Company merchants in Bombay mixed with the Parsees during the early days of the company, and later, once their rule was established, they often employed Parsee butlers in their households. By these means the Parsee dish of dhansak became well known to the British. This is a dhal of four pulses, which is made with either chicken or mutton and vegetables. It is thick and very spicy, and is best eaten, Parsee-fashion, with caramelised brown rice and fried onions.27 The use of tamarind and jaggery in the dish betrayed the influence of the Gujarati love of sweet and sour on Parsee cooking. Dhansak was one of the ‘curries’ which regularly appeared on Anglo-Indian dining tables and which eventually became a standard item on British Indian restaurant menus.
Not only did the Anglo-Indians’ eclectic approach to Indian cookery create a repertoire of dishes which brought together in one kitchen influences ranging from all over the subcontinent, they also transported this cuisine around India. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British influence could be felt from the southern tip of Ceylon, to the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan, and the eastern Burmese jungles. Wherever they went the Anglo-Indians took curry.
The British in India were constantly on the move. Every two or three years company officials (both civil and military) were posted to new stations, which necessitated packing up and transporting their entire households over vast distances. Emma Roberts thought ‘a more unfixed, unsettled, floating community cannot be imagined’.28 After Frederick Shore finished his year of studies at Fort William College in Calcutta, he moved at least seven times in the course of his nineteen years as a Bengal civil servant. His first posting was as assistant to the Board of Commissioners at Farrukhabad. He had two choices as to how to travel the five hundred miles from Calcutta to Farrukhabad. The first was to dawdle upriver in a large, cumbersome flat-bottomed boat known as a budgerow. By this means the journey would have taken about four months. The alternative was to travel by dak (post), along the route taken by the postal runners who carried the mail. The dak passenger was transported in a palanquin, carried by six or eight bearers who were changed every few miles, like horses for stagecoaches in Europe. This would have cut the journey by half, but it was by no means a comfortable means of transport, as one army officer warned:
We cannot promise you much pleasure in the enjoyment of this celebrated Oriental luxury. Between your head and the glowing sun, there is scarcely half an inch of plank, covered with a thin mat, which ought to be, but never is watered. After a day or two you will hesitate which to hate the most, your bearers’ monotonous, melancholy, grunting, groaning chant, when fresh, or their jolting, jerking, shambling, staggering gait, when tired. In a perpetual state of low fever you cannot eat, drink or sleep; your mouth burns, your head throbs, your back aches, and your temper borders upon the ferocious.29
It was necessary to make good arrangements for provisions on such a long journey. Early travellers in India had learned that it was best to travel well equipped, otherwise one could expect to live frugally. Given that the majority of the population was vegetarian, it was difficult to buy anything other than a few lentils, some rice and a little butter, and so the British took virtually everything they might need with them. In 1638, Albert de Mandelslo journeyed with some British merchants carrying supplies of silver and trade goods to the factories which dotted the route from Surat to Agra. On the way they shot wild ducks and met ‘with so many Deer and wild Boars, that it was no hard matter for us to get a good supper’. They even travelled with their own cooks to ensure the meat was prepared to their liking.30 Lord Auckland did the same when he travelled from Calcutta to Simla in 1837. He took his French chef St Cloup, who presided over a small army of cooks whipping up lavish breakfasts and good dinners for the Governor-General’s guests, including the Nawab of Oudh. His entourage was the size of a small city. A train of 850 camels, 140 elephants, 250 horses and 12,000 personnel stretched across the plain for ten miles, raising a cloud of dust which must have been visible for miles. This was travel in the style of the Mughal emperors whose effect as they passed over the country was that of a plague of locusts. Besides the damage done to the farmers’ fields, the Mughal camp would requisition all available food to supply the entourage and leave hunger and misery behind them. Lord Auckland’s servants were instructed to pay for any food supplied by the peasantry but this did not make the farmers any less reluctant to relinquish their stores, especially as much of the area they passed through was already suffering from famine.31
Travellers who went by budgerow or dak caused less devastation. They would buy from the villagers ‘boiled and smoked milk in earthen pots, [and] very small eggs of doubtful age’, but otherwise budgerow travellers were served by a cook-boat which would draw alongside at mealtimes to serve the passengers hot rolls for breakfast and meat curries in the evenings.32 It was, however, always wise to keep some provisions on the main boat (as well as tea-making equipment) as the cook-boat was occasionally delayed and no dinner obtainable.33 Travelling by dak was done at night in order to avoid the heat of the sun and the day was spent in camp where the cook rustled up meals over a small portable stove. In the 1840s a network of dak bungalows was built which provided the traveller with food and a place to rest. These soon became notorious for their cookery. ‘The [dak] bungalow khansaman, knowing that he has no other condiment whatever to offer to the hungry traveller, will, when asked, unblushingly profess to provide every delicacy of the season; but when he appears and uncovers his dishes, there is fowl, nothing but fowl, of every age, size, and degree of toughness.’34 Chicken was the only meat which could easily be made available at a moment’s notice. Anglo-Indians often joked that as soon as he saw the dust of a traveller rising in the distance the bungalow cook would rush out to catch and kill one of the scrawny chickens scratching in the yard. The ubiquitous chicken was often presented to the traveller in the form of ‘country captain’, one of the best-known Anglo-Indian curries. There are many different versions of this dish but it was basically a curry of freshly killed chicken, flavoured with turmeric and chillies, both ingredients which kept well. Nobody knows how the curry acquired its name but some suggest that it was invented by the captain of a ‘country’ (i.e. Indian) boat. It was certainly frequently served to the British when they were ‘up-country’, travelling by budgerow or dak.35 It was accompanied by ‘country’ bread which most Anglo-Indians hated. But despite all the complaints ‘chuppaties made of coarse flour like oatmeal, and deliciously hot, were an excellent substitute [for European bread] . . . Fresh goat’s milk could also be had, and as travellers always carried their own tea, it was quite possible to get a hearty and satisfactory meal.’36
Cold meats and curries are sometimes converted into this dish, the condiments for which are as follows: – Two chittacks or four ounces of ghee, half a teaspoonful of ground chillies, one teaspoonful of salt, a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground turmeric, and twenty onions, cut up lengthways into fine slices.
Cut up in the usual way an ordinary curry chicken. Warm the ghee and fry the sliced onions, which when brown set aside; fry the ground turmeric and chillies, then throw in the chicken and salt, and continue to fry, stirring the whole until the chicken is tender. Serve it up, strewing over it the fried onions.37
Another set of curries belong under the heading of camp cookery. During the cold weather between October and May the civil servant travelled around his district ‘surveying the country, inspecting and forwarding the work of irrigation . . . settling with the zemindars for their taxes’ and administering justice. Life in camp was far more luxurious than dak or budgerow travel, and each campsite was transformed into a ‘large and handsome’ village of tents, all of which were fitted out with glass doors and a stove. Emma Roberts was impressed that ‘Indian servants [in camp] never permit their masters to regret the want of regular kitchens’. They would produce ‘fish of every kind, fresh, dried, pickled or preserved, or hermetically sealed in a tin; delicate fricassées, rissoles, croquettes, omelettes, and curries of all descriptions; cold meats and game of all sorts, jellies, and jams from London and Lucknow, fruits and sweetmeats; with cakes in endless variety, splendidly set out in china, cut glass, and silver’.38 Often a party of men and women would accompany the civil servant, spending their days indulging in the favourite Anglo-Indian pastime of shikari (hunting). This gave rise to an entire branch of Anglo-Indian curries, including braised quail, wild duck and rabbit curry.39 To accompany these, the cooks made up fiery shikari sauces of salt or fermented fish, chillies, cayenne pepper, asafoetida, mushrooms and wine which Roberts thought ‘assuredly the most piquant adjuncts to flesh and fowl which the genius of a gastronome has ever compounded’.40
Like the Mughals and the Portuguese before them, the British refashioned Indian food according to their tastes, and created an independent branch of Indian cookery. This Anglo-Indian cuisine was even the first truly pan-Indian cuisine, in that it absorbed techniques and ingredients from every Indian region and was eaten throughout the entire length and breadth of the subcontinent. But Anglo-Indian cookery can never be described as a truly national Indian cuisine, as the hybrid dishes which it produced were only consumed by the British in India. Unlike the Mughals and the Portuguese, the British failed to create a new branch of cookery which spread to the rest of the population.
This is the Parsee dish which the British liked best. The Parsees brought a fondness for mixtures of meat and vegetables or meat and fruit with them to the west coast of India, where they were influenced by the Gujarati love of sweet and sour and Indian spice mixtures. Traditionally, dhansak is made with four different sorts of lentils and eaten with caramelised brown rice and fried onions. Serves 6–8.
75g red split lentils (masoor dhal)
75g split mung beans (moong dhal)
75g skinned toor dhal
75g skinned split chickpeas (chana dhal)
2 large onions, finely sliced
½ teaspoon turmeric
500g vegetables of your choice, chopped into bite-size pieces, such as pumpkin, aubergine, potatoes, peppers, spinach
1cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped
2 whole garlic cloves
bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
4–6 tablespoons vegetable oil
2cm piece of fresh ginger, finely grated
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
½ teaspoon chilli powder
2 brown cardamoms
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
3 tomatoes, chopped
2 green chillies, chopped
1kg chicken cut into pieces
300ml chicken stock
1–2 teaspoons jaggery or soft brown sugar
juice of 1 lemon or lime
Wash the lentils (dhals) and peas and soak in salted water over night.
Drain the lentils and peas and place in a large pan with 750ml water with the onions and the turmeric. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes. Add the vegetables and the 1cm piece of ginger, 2 whole garlic cloves and most of the fresh coriander, and simmer until the lentils and peas are soft. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Then mash or purée the mixture with a potato masher or in a food processor.
Heat 4–6 tablespoons of oil in a pan and add the grated ginger, crushed garlic and fry for 5 minutes. Add the cumin, coriander, chilli powder, cardamoms, cinnamon, mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds and continue frying. After a few seconds add the tomatoes and green chillies. Fry for another 2 minutes, stirring. Add the chicken and fry until all the pieces are browned.
Add the chicken and spice mix to the lentil mix and salt to taste. Add 300ml chicken stock, the jaggery and lemon or lime juice. Simmer and serve when the meat is thoroughly cooked. Garnish with chopped fresh green coriander.
