ON 27 MARCH 1811, an advert appeared in The Times which announced to the retired East India Company officials of London that they would now be able to enjoy ‘Indian dishes in the highest perfection’ at the newly opened Hindostanee Coffee House. At the corner of Charles Street and George Street, the coffee house was well placed, as this area, around Portman Square, had recently become fashionable among returned Anglo-Indians. The old India hands could sit in custom-made bamboo-cane chairs, surrounded by paintings of Indian scenes, and reminisce about their former lives while savouring curries ‘allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any . . . ever made in England’. In a separate smoking room, they could whiffle away at their hookahs. One notorious patron, Charles Stewart, who was rumoured to have had sixteen Indian wives and to have bathed in the Ganges every morning when in Calcutta, referred to the establishment as the ‘Hooka Club’. The Indian proprietor, Sake Dean Mahomed, assured his customers that the spices, oils and herbs, both for the curries and for the hookah tobacco, were all specially procured in India. This ensured an ‘authentic’ taste which allowed his customers to feel themselves transported back to their old haunts.1
Sake Dean Mahomed designed the first curry house in Britain to appeal to men like William Makepeace Thackeray, the first bearer of that name, who made a fortune in India as the collector of Syhlet district. In this wild and forested part of Bengal, he collected the East India Company’s revenue in the form of cowry shells for a salary of about £62 per annum. This was hardly a sum to make a man rich. However, elephants were plentiful in Syhlet and Thackeray rounded them up and sold them to the company at a rate which enabled him, after only ten years in India, to capture a pretty bride and retire aged a mere twenty-seven. On his return to Britain in 1776, he settled down to a peaceful life digging the garden of the small country estate at Hadley, in Middlesex, which he purchased with his riches.2
Retired East India Company officials were by now familiar figures on the London scene. They were known as nabobs, a British corruption of the word nawab, meaning a governor or ruler of a district. Like Thackeray, these men used their wealth to buy themselves country estates; often, they also bought seats in Parliament, thus purchasing themselves a place in the British social elite. The established aristocracy, feeling their position of power was threatened, attacked the nabobs as social upstarts, and accused them of corrupting honest hard-working Britain with oriental luxury. An alternative school portrayed them as bumbling but likeable figures of fun. Nabobs popped up, often as minor figures, in many of the plays, books and newspapers of the period. William Makepeace Thackeray’s grandson and namesake often included a nabob as one of the characters in his novels. Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair is the collector of Boggley Wollah. He suffers from a ‘liver complaint . . . superabundant fat . . . indolence and a love of good living’. A foolish, greedy figure, he is easily hoodwinked by the anti-heroine, Becky Sharp. In Thackeray’s The Newcomes, the ‘loose trousers, long mustachios and yellow face’ of the kindly Colonel Newcome of the Bengal Cavalry reveal that he is a nabob. The colonel loses his fortune in the Bundelcund Bank crash.
Dean Mahomed’s speculation in curries was as unsuccessful as Colonel Newcome’s venture into Indian banking. Less than two years after he opened the Hindostanee Coffee House, he was forced to petition for bankruptcy. Although the food and ambience were favourably reviewed in the Epicure’s Almanack, the Hindostanee was unable to compete with a number of other coffee houses which were better established and closer to the City of London. Norris Street Coffee House on the Haymarket had been serving curries since at least 1773 and the Jerusalem Coffee House in Cornhill was already established as the base for East India Company merchants and officials.3 Mahomed’s partner carried on the business, although it is unclear whether he maintained the Indian atmosphere. Mahomed, with more success this time, set up a vapour bath in Brighton where the Prince Regent enjoyed being ‘shampooed’. This involved vigorously massaging the skin with a loofah-like glove.
It is likely that many of the nabobs who settled around Portman Square had no need of Mahomed’s curries because they could afford to employ their own Indian cooks. Returning Anglo-Indians, unwilling to exchange the smooth subservience of their Indian servants for the truculence of British housemaids, routinely brought their ayahs (nannies), menservants and cooks back to Britain with them.
Ringa Swamee bitterly regretted hiring himself to a sahib in Benares, who had ‘brought me to England fifteen years ago and then died and left me helpless’. Ringa Swamee and his English wife and child had been reduced to begging. In The Asiatic in England Joseph Salter, a missionary who worked with stray Asiatics, described how the journey to Britain ended in disaster for many of these domestics. Newspapers were dotted with notices posted by Indian servants hoping to escape such a fate by finding work with a family returning to India.
Other notices asked for sightings of Indian absconders. Escaped domestics could disappear into the oriental underworld which the East India trade had created in London. A network of grubby boarding houses existed in Whitechapel and in the ‘Oriental quarter’ around the high street in Shadwell. Here, lascars (Indian sailors) stayed while they waited for their ships to sail. Joseph Salter visited one such house in the 1850s, kept by ‘Abdool Rhemon, a native of Surat, near Bombay . . . [who] thrives at his countrymen’s expense’. Rhemon was said to have begun his career sweeping a crossing at St Paul’s Churchyard, but after the Nepalese ambassador took an interest in him he was able to set up his own business. ‘He kept two houses in this vicinity . . . the first floors being set apart as opium smoking-rooms. When Lascars were in the docks, these houses were invaded . . . We might go upstairs . . . and see them reclining on beds, smoking the insidious opium.’4 Many of the boarding-house keepers were ‘assisted by an English mistress, some of whom have lived so long in this element, that they use the Oriental vernacular [and] bear names . . . such as Mrs Mohammed . . . or Calcutta Louisa, and Lascar Sally.’ Many of the sailors jumped ship and made a living begging, thieving or working as street sweepers and hawkers of cheap goods. Salter came across one who made ends meet by selling ‘curry powder to gentlefolks in the suburbs’ and others must have found employment as cooks in the households of returning company merchants.5
If they were unable to afford the expense of bringing an Indian cook home with them, and could not find an Indian in Britain, old India hands employed women like Sarah Shade who had learned to make curries in India. Sarah had led an adventurous life as a soldier’s wife. In an account of her experiences, she claimed to have fought off a tiger by grasping the root of its tongue, and to have been laid out ready for burial perfectly sensible of what was happening to her, after a severe case of the flux had left her prostrate. Caught up in the Anglo-French wars in southern India, she was wounded in the face by shot and in the arm by a sabre, and then captured by the Sultan of Mysore’s army. Sarah’s knowledge of Indian cooking now came in useful as one of her captors was so impressed by her ability to speak his language and to prepare Indian food that he helped her, and her husband, to escape. Sarah undoubtedly picked up her culinary and linguistic skills among the Indian and Eurasian wives of the other soldiers. Many British soldiers married ‘pretty, half-caste girls’, and in 1813 one army officer estimated that ‘a third of the people in this country are either married to this race or have children grown up by Hindoostanee women’.6 Sarah Shade left her husband in India to return to Britain in the 1780s. Here, her knowledge of Indian cookery again helped her to survive as she kept herself out of the workhouse ‘by making curry for different East Indian families’.7
British households did not necessarily need an Indian cook for curries to be produced in their kitchens. Indian food found its way into British food culture by various channels. Family members at home were eager to learn about the exotic lives of sons and brothers in India and the young men often enclosed recipes in letters. Wilhelmina and Stephana Malcolm, stranded, unmarried, at the family home of Burnfoot, Dumfriesshire, kept up a regular correspondence with their ten brothers, some of whom were seeking their fortunes in India. The sisters copied their brothers’ instructions on how to make ‘mulgatawy’ soup and Indian pickle into their kitchen notebooks alongside more traditional recipes for Brown Windsor soup and potato puffs.8
Equally eclectic recipe collections were put together by the women who accompanied their husbands to India, garnered from their Indian cooks. When they retired, or returned to Britain on leave, Anglo-Indians instructed their British cooks in the art of preparing a good curry. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Jos Sedley’s mother mentions that she has ordered the cook to make him a curry for dinner that night just as he likes it. Having set her sights on Jos as a possible marriage prospect, Becky Sharp decides to gain his favour by tasting the dish. She suffers ‘tortures with the cayenne pepper’ and Jos and his father mischievously add to her misfortune by offering her a chilli. Misled by the name which sounds like ‘something cool’ she eats it with relief, only to discover that it is even hotter. Forced to throw dignity to the wind, Becky calls for water, to peals of laughter from Mr Sedley and his son. Outside fiction, however, Anglo-Indians were often successful in introducing their relatives and friends at home to the delights of Indian food. Although Thackeray was born in India, he was sent home at the age of four, like most Anglo-Indian children, to receive a British education, thus leaving India before he could acquire a liking for its food. But he discovered a taste for curry at the dining tables of his various aunts and uncles who had lived there. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic that he is said to have written ‘A poem to curry’:
Three pounds of veal my darling girl prepares,
And chops it nicely into little squares;
Five onions next prures the little minx
(The biggest are the best, her Samiwel thinks),
And Epping butter nearly half a pound,
And stews them in a pan until they’re brown’d.
What’s next my dextrous little girl will do?
She pops the meat into the savoury stew,
With curry-powder table-spoonfuls three,
And milk a pint (the richest that may be),
And, when the dish has stewed for half an hour,
A lemon’s ready juice she’ll o’er it pour.
Then, bless her! Then she gives the luscious pot
A very gentle boil – and serves quite hot.
PS – Beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish,
Lobsters, or prawns, or any kind fish,
Are fit to make a CURRY. ’Tis when done,
A dish for Emperors to feed upon.9
Specialist recipe books began to appear, catering to the returned Anglo-Indian’s desire to reproduce Indian food. In 1831, the Oriental Translation Committee published a pamphlet entitled ‘Indian Cookery’ for the benefit of ‘that . . . considerable number of individuals and families in this country [who] have, from a long residence in the East, acquired a strong predilection for Indian modes of life’.10 It contained instructions on how to prepare the standard fare of Anglo-India – pilau, korma, dopiaza, khichari, kebabs and mango preserve – although the recipes were much closer to the Indian originals than later British recipes.
Enthusiasm for curries was no doubt fuelled by the bland nature of British cookery. Becky Sharp’s response to the cayenne pepper and chilli in Vanity Fair reveals how unused to spicy foods the British were at this period. This seems strange, given that it was the hunger for pepper and spices which had taken the British to India in the first place. But spices had slowly fallen out of favour in the West. During the seventeenth century, Europeans were captivated by the grace and beauty of classical architecture and sculpture, and they developed a passion for the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. This led to an investigation of classical cookery. The Romans loved pepper, and did in fact enjoy spicy food, but what interested seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cooks was the salt/acid taste combination of classical cookery, based on olives, capers and anchovies. This style of cookery accorded well with new scientific theories of digestion which envisaged the process as one of fermentation rather than combustion. Foods which had previously been shunned, such as mushrooms, anchovies and oysters, were redefined as healthy because they fermented easily. Spices, which had been seen as useful fuel to stoke the fires of the stomach, were now less valued. In France and Italy, the almond-based, spicy and fragrant cookery of the High Middle Ages, which relished the combination of sweet and sour, was replaced by a nouvelle cuisine. This eliminated the sweet from savoury dishes and relied on sauces based on butter and oils, which were thought to help bind the salts and chemicals which were the end result of fermentation. As a consequence, European cuisines became much blander.11
Britain took its culinary lead from France, and spices such as nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon were banished to the realm of puddings and cakes. Boxes of cumin, coriander, cardamom and saffron, which had once been regarded as precious luxuries, grew dusty on the pantry shelves. Hot spicy food was condemned as overly stimulating and likely to arouse dangerous passions and lusts.12 These prejudices were combined with a distrust of vegetables. Onions, garlic and leeks were regarded with suspicion because they tainted the breath and were thought to be difficult to digest. By the end of the eighteenth century, the range of ‘safe’ vegetables was limited to old potatoes, cauliflowers, broccoli, French beans and asparagus. Meat, roasted, boiled and baked in pies, was still the staple food among the middle classes. Under these conditions, French nouvelle cuisine suffered in the hands of British cooks. A Swiss pastor complained in 1782 that the normal fare in a coffee house was ‘a piece of half boiled or half roasted meat; and a few cabbage-leaves, boiled in plain water; on which they pour a sauce made of flour and butter, the usual method for dressing vegetables in England’.13 Curries must have made a very welcome change.
Although the demand for spices had lessened, the British remained greedy for oriental goods. In the seventeenth century, tea drinking was introduced into polite society from China and this stimulated the demand for elegant tea bowls and fine Chinese porcelain. A number of small shops specialising in oriental wares sprung up in London. At Peter Motteaux’s boutique in Leadenhall Street, the connoisseur of luxury goods could buy tall blue-and-white Chinese jars, rich brocades, and cabinets in burnished gold.14 Ladies’ fashions incorporated Eastern elements, and there was a craze for turbans, the soft pashmina shawls of Kashmir, and Indian muslins worked in silver and gold. Returning nabobs introduced Indian architecture into Britain. At Sezincote in the Cotswolds, Charles Cockerell built himself a house in the oriental style with domes and ornamental pillars. At each end of the house he constructed summerhouses with stars painted on the ceilings so that he could recapture the Indian experience of sleeping outside under the night sky. The Prince Regent followed suit with the Brighton Pavilion refashioned (1815–23) into an oriental fantasy of domes and pillars. Alongside this enthusiasm for exotic wares, interest grew in the cookery of the East. Ordinary British ladies and gentlemen with no connection to India began to look with curiosity upon these newfangled curries.
By the 1840s a number of Indian products were for sale and their producers went to great lengths to persuade the British public that they should add curry to their diet. Edmund White, the maker of Selim’s Curry products, presented curry as a health food. In accordance with the methods of Victorian advertising, he wrote a pamphlet pompously entitled ‘Curries: their Healthful and Medicinal Qualities; their Importance in a Domestic, Commercial, and National Point of View’. In this, he argued that the consumption of fish curries made with Selim’s True Indian Curry Paste would aid digestion by stimulating the stomach, which would in turn stimulate the circulation of the blood, resulting in a more vigorous mind.15 He even claimed that curries could save lives and cited the preposterous case of a Mr Harper of the Jerusalem Coffee House (the well-known haunt of East India merchants) who, having tried all medicines without relief, had fallen into despair, only to be saved by the aromatics administered to him by Mr White in a curry paste.16
The Duke of Norfolk, perhaps irritated by these advertising strategies, suggested that if curry was so beneficial perhaps the Irish poor, then suffering under the effects of the potato famine, might use it to stave off their hunger pangs. This insensitive remark was deservedly lampooned in Punch, which claimed that he would soon be publishing a brochure entitled ‘How to live on a pinch of curry’, containing a recipe for ‘A capital soup’: ‘Take a saucepan, or, if you have not one, borrow one. Throw in about a gallon of good water, and let it warm over a fire till it boils. Now be ready with your curry, which you may keep in a snuff box if you like, and take a pinch of it. Pop the pinch of curry into the hot water, and serve it out, before going to bed, to your hungry children.’17
Among the general populace there were stalwart believers in the health-giving properties of curries. One of the readers of Queen magazine reported in 1863 that her ‘Great Aunt always had a great idea of the advantage of adding a curry to her bill of fare in hot weather. It is good for the digestion, she would say, and that is why hot things are so relished in India. Excessive heat interferes with the vital functions, and the digestive powers require a stimulant when enervated by the heat. She was very proud of her home-made curry powder, the receipt for which had been given to her by some of her Eastern friends in her younger days.’18
The first British cookbook to include Indian recipes was Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery published in 1747. In it she gave three different recipes for pilau. Later editions included recipes for fowl or rabbit curry and Indian pickle. An adventurous cook, Glasse also included recipes for potatoes and instructions on how ‘to dress Haddocks the Spanish Way’ which included tomatoes.19 Although these New World vegetables had been known to the British since Columbus’s voyages to America, they were still confined to the experimental kitchens of the wealthy, whose servants Glasse’s manual was designed to instruct.
Curries initially suffered from the fact that they were viewed as a form of stew which was regarded as a lower-class way of preparing meat.20 It was not until the middle classes developed into a powerful social and economic force during the first half of the nineteenth century that curry really entered British kitchens.
The domestic ideology of the middle classes, which celebrated the virtuous housewife, transformed thrift into a mark of respectability. Cookery books and household manuals praised the middle-class woman who ran an efficient and economic household and who was able to stretch the food budget. Curries came into favour as an excellent way of using up cold meat. The British in India sometimes curried cold meat, and this is the origin of the jalfrezi which appears in Anglo-Indian cookery books as cold meat fried with lots of onions and some chillies.21 In Mrs Beeton’s definitive middle-class recipe book, all the beef and chicken curries were labelled as suitable for ‘cold meat cookery’. The irony of this state of affairs was unappreciated by most British consumers of curries who were unaware that the consumption of leftovers was taboo among the majority of Hindus.
Whether it was for its taste, its practicality or its nutritional values, curry was firmly established as part of the British culinary landscape by the 1850s. The author of Modern Domestic Cookery (1852) commented that while curry was ‘formerly a dish almost exclusively for the tables of those who had made long residence in India, [it] is now so completely naturalised, that few dinners are thought complete unless one is on the table’.22 If the recipe books are to be believed, there was virtually nothing that the British would not stew in curry sauce, from ordinary cuts of meat to calf’s feet, ox palates, sheep’s heads, lobsters and periwinkles. The middle classes were beginning to abandon the excess of the eighteenth century, when all the dishes were placed on the table at the same time in a display of profusion. Following the new French fashion, polite society dined à la Russe. This meant that the dishes and joints were placed on the sideboard and handed round, one by one, by the servants. The meal was divided into a number of courses, and a standard pattern of soup, fish, entrée, roast, followed by dessert, and sometimes a savoury, was established. The emphasis shifted from the quantity of the food to its refinement. To the discerning consumer, the light and often fanciful entrées were the most important dishes. Curries provided the chef with another opportunity to display his finesse in ‘made’ dishes, as opposed to simple joints of meat. The curry even shook off its reputation as a way of using up leftovers and began to appear at dinner parties. In the 1850s, a range of suggested menus for dinners of various sizes were published in a book entitled What Shall We Have for Dinner?. The author was given as Lady Maria Clutterbuck but the real writer is believed to have been Charles Dickens’s wife, Catherine, and Dickens himself may even have had a hand in the publication. Curried lobster, curried oysters and mutton curry rice were all included in the menus alongside roast goose, stewed eels with oyster sauce and cold pigeon pie.23
As the taste for curry spread to more and more people in Britain, it became a subject of discussion in the letter sections of women’s periodicals. ‘Madame,’ wrote W.M.B. from Bath in the ladies’ magazine Queen, ‘you supply me at times with such excellent recipes, I should be glad if you could favour me with a good one for dressing meats with Indian curry powder.’ Other readers sent in their favourite curry recipes and there were lengthy discussions about how the rice should be served (separately or with the curry sauce poured over it), which implements it should be eaten with (spoons were favoured) and whether Patna was more suitable than Carolina rice. The correspondents frequently proudly emphasised the ‘authenticity’ of their recipes, claiming they had been passed on to them by native cooks. One reader even claimed to have learned the secret for preparing ‘Genuine Madras Curry Powder’ from the butler to one of the sons of the infamous Tipoo Sahib.24 Even Richard Terry, chef de cuisine at the Oriental Club, felt the need to emphasise that the recipes in his Indian Cookery were ‘gathered, not only from my own knowledge of Cookery, but from Native Cooks’.
Despite these protestations, Rakhal Haldar, professor of Sanskrit at University College London in the 1840s and 50s, found the curries his British hosts kindly ordered ‘in consideration of my being an Indian . . . as different from the genuine Indian curry as two things can possibly be’.25 And of course, the curries and pilaus produced in nineteenth-century British kitchens were even more Anglicised than those which were prepared in India for Anglo-Indian consumption.
British curries in India used a basic formula: first spices, onions and garlic were ground and bound together by ghee, then this paste was added to some meat, and simmered. As Thackeray’s poem to curry illustrates, in Britain a similar recipe was followed. Onions and meat were first fried in butter, then curry powder was added, followed by stock or milk, and the mixture was left to simmer. Just before serving, a dash of lemon juice was added. The curries to be found in British recipe books are all variations on this template. The same recipe could be transformed into ‘Bengal Chicken Curry’ by adding to the sauce a spoonful of Bengal chutney, pickled limes and mangoes, or into ‘Melay Curry’ by adding half a grated coconut.26 What distinguished curries in Britain from their Anglo-Indian counterparts was their reliance on curry powder, something which no self-respecting Indian cook would have allowed in the kitchen. Indian kitchens were not properly equipped without a heavy flat grindstone on which the spices were laboriously crushed by a rolling-pin-shaped stone. The day’s supply of spices was freshly ground each morning, and in wealthy households a special assistant, the masalchi, was employed to grind the spices.27 The stones were also used to crush onions, garlic, chillies and fresh herbs such as coriander, to produce cooking pastes and chutneys. Freshly ground spices impart a flavour incomparable to that given to food by pre-ground spices which have been kept in a store cupboard.
Cut into small dice 2 onions, and fry with 2 pats of butter: add your chicken cut into small joints, with one tablespoonfull of curry paste, ½ of powder, ½ of Bengal chutnee, ½ pickled lime, and ½ pickled mango: stir the whole over a slow fire 10 minutes, cover the chicken with broth or water, and let simmer 1½ hours – by this time the curry will be almost dry – add 1 teaspoonful of cream, and serve with rice, separate.28
Even when they were cooking for their British masters, Indian cooks would have maintained the principle of adding freshly ground spices at different stages of the cooking process. When Anglo-Indians initially began to collect Indian recipes to bring home with them, they too followed this principle. In eighteenth-century Britain the nabobs purchased their coriander and cumin seeds, their cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks separately from their local chemist. When curry first appeared in a British cookery book, no mention was made of curry powder. Hannah Glasse in 1747 instructed her readers to ‘Brown some Coriander Seeds over the Fire in a clean Shovel’ before beating them to a powder, much as an Indian masalchi would have done.29 The Oriental Translation Committee’s ‘Indian Cookery’ of 1831 listed the specific spices for each recipe and followed the principle of adding them at separate stages in the cooking process.
But as the Anglo-Indians began to think of curries as variations on one theme, they began to collect recipes for spice mixtures which they simply labelled ‘Curry Powder’. By the 1850s British cookery books called for a spoonful of curry powder in most of their Indian dishes. Sometimes they supplied recipes for curry powders which the cook could make up in advance, but as the popularity of curries became widespread it became easy to buy curry mixes. As early as 1784, Sorlie’s Perfumery Warehouse in Picadilly advertised that it was now selling ready-mixed curry powder.30 Between 1820 and 1840 imports of turmeric, the main ingredient in British curry powder, increased threefold from, 8,678 lb to 26,468 lb.31 Nevertheless, the British preferred Indian-made products and a correspondent to one ladies’ periodical complained that no British-manufactured curry powders or pickles (including Crosse & Blackwell’s) could equal those of Manoekjee Poojajee’s of Bombay.32 In the 1860s, Payne’s Oriental Warehouse in Regent and Mortimer Streets proudly advertised that all its curry powders and pastes, chutneys, pickled mangoes, tamarind fish, essences of chillies and preserved ginger were made at the Belatee Bungalow in Calcutta. The Leicester Square Oriental Depot advertised that it was prepared to send goods out to country residences for those enjoying time away from London on their country estates. By the end of the century, even non-specialist grocers normally stocked three types of curry powder: a yellow, a brown and a fiery, chilli-flavoured red one.33 The condiments necessary to make curry were easy to procure but the delicate nuances of Indian cookery were lost.
turmeric 8 oz
coriander seed 4
oz cummin seed 2 oz
foenugreek seed 2 oz
cayenne ½ oz
We recommend Mssrs Corbyn and Co., 300 High Holborn for the spices
Over-reliance on curry powder meant that British curries had a tendency to degenerate into a kind of ‘hash’.34 In 1845, Edmund White derided British curries as ‘nothing more nor less than a bad stew, rendered the more abominably noxious from the quantity of yellowish green fat which must inevitably float in the dish. It would be ridiculous to call such dishes . . . True Indian Curries, or to talk about their healthful properties . . . they can only be referred to as a sample of the kind of dishes generally in use in England.’35
Pre-prepared spice mixes, known as masalas in India, are used occasionally on the subcontinent but they are usually added to the dish at the end of the cooking process. In Kashmir the women still make ver, a mixture of mustard oil, garlic and chillies ground together with a combination of spices which is made into a paste and shaped into doughnut-shaped discs. These are left to dry in the shade and then threaded on to strings and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. A little ver is crumbled over dishes as they are placed on the table to impart a hot zing to the food. In Gujarat travellers carry balls of pounded garlic, red chillies and salt bound together with oil which they sprinkle over meals made over the campfire.36 There are good reasons why Indians rarely use pre-prepared masalas as the main flavouring for their dishes. Spices take different lengths of time to release their flavour. Thus it is better to add slow-releasing coriander to the cooking oil before adding turmeric, which is quick to impart its flavour, or cumin, which is apt to burn. Spices thrown into hot oil simultaneously tend to cook unevenly and the cook runs the risk of flavouring the dish with a slightly burnt or a slightly raw taste. The Christian communities of Bombay and Bassein get around this problem when they make curry powder by roasting each spice for the necessary amount of time before grinding it and mixing it with all the others. Their spice mixture is known as ‘bottled masala’, as they store it in long green bottles.37
Another typically British habit was to add the curry powder at the same time as the stock or water. In fact, spices release their taste more effectively when they are first fried in hot oil. For this reason, cooking pots in India are often rounded in order to allow the oil to collect at the bottom so that the spices can be fried first without using excessive quantities of fat.38 The flavour of a spice is also determined by the way in which it is treated before it is added to the dish. For example, roasted and crushed cumin tastes nutty, but fried whole in hot oil it imparts a gentler liquorice flavour.39 Spices added to a wet sauce give a different, less aromatic flavour to the dish than when the spices are fried.
Thirdly, British cooks routinely thickened curries by making a roux of curry powder mixed with flour, a technique which was used to thicken stews and casseroles. Wheat flour is never used in this way in Indian dishes, which are given body with ground almonds, coconut cream or a paste of onions.
One of the more authoritative British cookery writers, Eliza Acton, lamented ‘the great superiority of the oriental curries over those generally prepared in England’ which she attributed to ‘many of the ingredients which in a fresh and green state add so much to their excellence, being here beyond our reach’. She was also aware that Indian cooks varied their ‘dishes . . . with infinite ingenuity, blending in them very agreeably many condiments of different flavour, till the highest degree of piquancy and savour is produced . . . With us, turmeric and cayenne pepper prevail in them far too powerfully.’ But within the limitations of curry powder and British currying techniques, Acton recommended a number of measures which would save British curries from turning into spice-flavoured casseroles. ‘A couple of ounces of sweet sound cocoa-nut lightly grated . . . in the gravy of a currie is . . . a great improvement to its flavour,’ she pronounced. This was an attempt to reproduce the flavour of coconut milk frequently used in south Indian dishes. Acton also pointed out that ‘tamarinds imported in the shell – not preserved’ were available as a way of giving British curries an authentic taste. Most British cooks, however, had to rely on lemon juice (and sometimes sour gooseberries) as a substitute for unobtainable tamarinds. Lemon juice, added at the end of the cooking process, became a standard ingredient in British curry. Apples were often used to replace mangoes, cucumbers or marrows to replace bitter gourds, which were essential ingredients in Bengali cuisine. Sultanas, that were sometimes added to Mughlai pilaus, also found their way into curries. They added a touch of the exotic and perhaps it was thought that they complemented the apples. After time, these ingredients were no longer viewed as substitutes for more authentic ingredients but instead as essential components of a good curry. When Leon Petit ran the restaurant in Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta in the 1950s he was ‘met with polite smiles of disbelief when [he] tried to explain to Indian cooks that apples [and sultanas] are essential to Western curries’.40
The remains of cold roast veal, 4 onions, 2 apples (sliced), 2 tablespoonsful of ‘Empress’ curry powder, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, ½ pint of broth or water, 1 tablespoonful of lemon juice.
Slice the onions and apples, and fry them in a little butter; then take them out, cut the meat into neat slices, and fry these to a pale brown. Add the curry powder and flour, put in the onions, apples, add a little broth or water, and stew gently till quite tender; add the lemon juice and serve with an edging of boiled rice. The curry may be ornamented with pickles, capsicums, and gherkins arranged prettily on top.41
On arrival in Bombay in 1858 as the bride of a British army officer, Matty Robinson discovered that Anglo-Indian curries were quite unlike the British ones she was used to: ‘I can’t touch the Indian fruits or the fish which they say is so delicious, and as to the curries it makes me sick to think of them; give me an English one!’ she wrote.42 When Eliza Acton included Mr Arnott’s authentically Anglo-Indian curry in her Modern Cookery, she warned that it ‘will be found somewhat too acid for English taste in general, and the proportion of onion and garlic by one half too much for any but well-seasoned Anglo-Indian palates’.43 The Anglo-Indians also liked their curries extremely hot. Curry-powder vendors spent a great deal of energy trying to persuade their British customers that it was not necessary to ‘experience the discomfort occasioned by excessive heat in order to enjoy the full delicacy of Eastern condiments’.44
Once curries were firmly established in Victorian food culture, distinctively European herbs such as thyme and marjoram began to find their way into Indian recipes. Anglo-Indian dishes such as mulligatawny soup and kedgeree underwent further Anglicisation in the hands of British cooks. Richard Terry of the Oriental Club not only added the by now standard apples to his mulligatawny but also bay leaves, ham and turnips. Mrs Beeton included bacon in hers, while Eliza Acton strove for authenticity with ‘part of a pickled mango’ and grated coconut, but gave herself away by also suggesting the addition of the ‘pre-cooked flesh of part of a calf’s head’ and offal, as well as ‘a large cupful of thick cream’.45 Meanwhile, the transformation of the ever-versatile khichari continued. The Anglo-Indians had already added fried onions, fish and hard-boiled eggs to the rice and lentil dish. Now the aristocracy, who served kedgeree for breakfast during their country-house weekends, settled on smoked haddock as the definitive fish to add to the rice, and almost invariably abandoned the lentils.
Stock for the soup:
Cut into small pieces 1 fowl and 7 lbs of lean veal; place it in a stewpan with 1 oz. of lean ham, 2 carrots, 2 turnips, 4 cloves, 2 allspice, 1 blade of mace, and a small bunch of mixed herbs. Add one pint of water; place the stewpan over the fire, and let all the water reduce, then fill the stewpan up with water, and then let boil gently for four hours, then strain it off into a pan. Have ready another stewpan and add 1 small carrot, 2 onions, 4 apples sliced, ½ a turnip sliced, 2 ozs of lean ham, 1 bay leaf, 1 celery, 2 sprigs thyme, 3 cloves, 1 blade of mace, 4 ozs of butter; stir the whole over a slow fire for ten minutes; add 5 tablespoonful of curry powder and 1 of paste; stir again over the fire for 2 minutes; add 4 tablespoonful of potato flour, 2 of Arrowroot and ¾ lb of flour; stir all well together, then add the stock, and stir over the fire till boiling; add a small piece of garlic, the size of a pea, let all boil for 2 hours; if this should be too thick, add more stock; any kind will do. The soup should then be rubbed through a tammy and placed again in a stewpan; add a little more stock and stir till boiling, let boil gently at the corner of the stove fire for 1 hour, keeping well skimmed; season with a tablespoonful of salt and of ½ of sugar; if this soup should be too hot in flavour, add more potato flour; when finished this soup should not be too thick, and serve with small pieces of chicken in the soup, and rice in a separate dish.
The British also took their curries to their other colonies. Australia’s climate appealed to retiring Anglo-Indians who took their Indian eating habits with them. British companies exported curry powders and pastes to Antipodean cities, and the earliest cookery book published in Australia in 1864 ‘had a short essay on curry stuffs and the value of mixing one’s own’. It included recipes for the standard curries of Anglo-India – Madras, Bengal and Bombay – and suggested the typically British trick of substituting apples for mangoes. It also used the British technique of thickening the sauce by mixing the curry powder with flour. Australians made their own contribution to the development of curry, by adding wattlebird and kangaroo tail to the long list of meats which received the British curry treatment.46
European travellers to seventeenth-century India discovered that with their meals the Indians ate a wide range of achars, or pickles and chutneys. Many of these were freshly made each morning. While preparing the spices for the main dish, the masalchi might grind together fresh green coriander leaves, coconut and green chillies to create a sharp, tangy, bright green paste, delicious with the soft and spongy south Indian rice breads known as idlis. Other pickles and chutneys were more like preserves and the Europeans found them very useful when they travelled across the vast subcontinent. Pietro della Valle, who had so much trouble finding anything to eat while travelling in India, equipped himself for his journey with ‘many Vessels of conserves of the Pulp of young Indian Cane, or Bambu (which is very good to eat after this manner) and of green Pepper, Cucumbers and other Fruits wont to be pickled by them’.47 European sailors used to buy up jars of achar to take with them on their sea voyages and these must have greatly improved their diet of dry, and usually wormy, biscuits and hard salt meat.48
When jars of these pickles and chutneys arrived back in Britain with East India Company merchants and sailors, British cooks eagerly tried to reproduce them, just as they had done with curry, with the result that they underwent a similar process of metamorphosis. Indians very rarely used vinegar, and their pickles were made by layering vegetables or fruits in jars with oil or water. The mixture was flavoured with salt and spices and the jars were set in the hot sun where they were left to ferment. Lacking the intense heat of the Indian sun, British cooks resorted to vinegar to carry out the pickling process. Unable to lay their hands on mangoes or bamboo shoots, they tried out various substitutes such as marrows, apples or tomatoes for mangoes, and elder shoots for bamboo. Sultanas, persistently associated in the British mind with anything spicy, were also added. To reproduce the piquant heat provided by chillies, they added European flavourings such as horseradish and mustard powder.49 The bright yellow mixture of cauliflower, onions and mustard, known as piccalilli, almost certainly evolved out of these recipes. While curries made few inroads into British working-class households, jars of pickle became standard in all British pantries, and in the 1920s and 30s, housewives would prepare tomato or marrow chutneys for Christmas as a way of livening up the cold remains of the turkey.
To a gallon of vinegar one pound of garlick, and three quarters of a pound of long pepper, a pint of mustard seed, one pound of ginger, and two ounces of turmeric; the garlick must be laid in salt three days, then wip’d clean and dry’d in the sun; the long pepper broke, and the mustard seed bruised; mix all together in the vinegar, then take two large hard cabbages, and two cauliflowers, cut them in quarters, and salt them well; let them lie three days, and then dry them well in the sun.
N.B. The ginger must lie twenty-four hours in salt and water, then cut small and laid in salt three days.50
In China, East India Company merchants discovered soy sauce, and a number of soy-based condiments known as catsups. They took these dipping sauces back to India with them and John Ovington, who ate pilau and ‘dum poked’ chicken with the English East India Company merchants at Surat in 1689, noticed on the factory dining table ‘Bamboe and Mangoe Achar, and Souy, the choicest of Sawces, are always ready to whet the Appetite’. These sauces had the virtue of keeping for an extraordinarily long time and sailors stocked up with barrels of soy sauce and catsup for the long sea voyages. Recipes for these useful seasonings began to circulate in Britain. Hannah Glasse gave a recipe directed to the ‘Captains of Ships’ for a ‘Catchup to keep twenty Years’. It combined stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and mushrooms. She pointed out helpfully that ‘You may carry it to the Indies; a Spoonful of this to a Pound of fresh Butter melted, makes fine Fish-Sauce. Or in the room of Gravy-Sauce.’51
The commonest catsup was made from mushrooms until tomatoes became popular in the nineteenth century. Tomatoes had been cultivated in Britain since the sixteenth century but many people thought them poisonous as they belonged to the Solanaceae family of plants which includes poisonous nightshades such as belladonna. It was known, however, that the Italians ate them with olive oil and by the eighteenth century the British had plucked up sufficient courage to include them in their diet. Philip Miller, superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden, noted in 1752 that tomatoes were ‘much used in England for soups’. It is possible that tomatoes were introduced into the British diet by Jewish families from Spain and Portugal who had strong trading links with the Caribbean and Americas where tomatoes were routinely eaten. By the nineteenth century, British cooks had discovered how useful they were as a souring and thickening agent, in soups and broths, and they also adopted them as a base for catsups.52 Today the oriental origins of tomato ketchup, surely one of the most widespread relishes in the world, are forgotten.
In India, catsups were the inspiration for the piquant shikari sauces which the Anglo-Indians enjoyed with their game and it was one of these sauces which eventually became one of the best-known British flavourings. Sometime in the 1830s, Lord Marcus Sandys, the former Governor of Bengal, drove into Worcester from his nearby country estate to visit Lea & Perrins, his local chemist-cum-grocer. The shop on Broad Street sold foodstuffs, cosmetics and all sorts of medicines and was known for its supply of spices and dried fruits specially imported from Asia and the Americas. Lord Sandys arrived with a recipe on a scrap of paper and requested Lea & Perrins to make up his favourite Indian sauce. The mixture which Messrs Lea & Perrins duly concocted was so fiery that it made their eyes water. But as has already been mentioned, according to Emma Roberts these sauces were ‘assuredly the most piquant adjuncts to flesh and fowl which the genius of a gastronome has ever compounded’. Sandys was delighted with the results. But the chemists were disgusted with the mixture. They put the extra barrels which they had made up for themselves in the cellar, where they were forgotten. During a spring clean, however, it was noticed that an appetising aroma was rising out of the abandoned barrels and on tasting the contents Lea and Perrins discovered that the concoction had matured into a pleasing spicy sauce. The enterprising pair went into immediate production. By 1845 they had set up a factory in Worcester, and by 1855 were selling over 30,000 bottles a year. Worcestershire sauce was even exported back to India.53
In 1858, the East India Company was abolished and India was brought under the administration of the Crown. The previous year Indian troops had rebelled against their British officers and sparked a popular uprising against the British in parts of northern India. In the light of the Indian mutiny it seemed inappropriate for a vital part of the British Empire to be controlled by a trading company. In 1877, Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India, as part of Prime Minister Disraeli’s project to revive the popularity of the monarchy. Empire and monarchy, bound together, were symbols in a political and social strategy which encouraged patriotism in the working classes. Music-hall songs, popular plays, children’s adventure stories, all celebrating Britain’s empire, distracted the working man from the inequalities in British society by encouraging him to identify with a larger imperial project. The enthusiasm for empire which developed in Britain during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was expressed in the exotic names given to an array of commercial sauces and relishes, such as Nabob’s, Mandarin, or Empress of India.54
Public interest in the empire was encouraged by a series of exhibitions which began with the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the specially constructed Crystal Palace. This combined the atmosphere of a funfair with educational displays of art, science, natural history and industry.55 After the stunning success of the Great Exhibition many others followed in London and Paris, and in the provincial towns of Britain. They marked a change in the British attitude towards empire, from a source of magical luxuries – spices, pashmina shawls, porcelain jars – to a more industrial and blatantly commercial interest. The galleries of the exhibitions demonstrated the usefulness of the colonies to Britain’s Industrial Revolution by displaying the various goods imported from the empire. The bales of hemp and jute and the sacks of tea contrasted with the cotton piece goods which Britain, in a reversal of fortunes, was now exporting to places like India. This impressed upon the spectator the importance of the empire as an export market for Britain’s industries.
Even the Queen caught empire fever. She was particularly fascinated by India. In Osborne House, which she and Albert built on the Isle of Wight, she collected Indian furnishings, paintings and objects in a specially designed wing. This included a durbar room with white and gold plasterwork in the shapes of flowers and peacocks. Here the Queen, bedecked in jewels and looking like a parody of a maharani, would entertain guests. Indian curries were prepared in the royal kitchens and Victoria employed Indian servants in gorgeous costumes to stand at her dining table. She was particularly fond of these servants, who attended to her every need with quiet efficiency, gliding in and out of rooms to assist the ageing and rather overweight Queen to stand up and walk about. One of these Indians, a handsome twenty-four-year-old named Abdul Karim, gained a sinister level of influence over her. Known as the Munshi, the Indian title for clerk, he appointed himself to the position of personal secretary. He taught her to write and speak a little Hindustani and, unlike the other servants who communicated with the Queen in writing, he had personal access to her.56 The resentment of her other servants and the concerns of government officials eventually reached such a pitch that the Queen was persuaded to demote her favourite Indian, but she never lost her powerful, if somewhat hazy, sense of affection for her Indian subjects in her distant empire.
If India featured prominently in the Queen’s imagination, its place in the popular fantasy world was assured by the Empire of India Exhibition held at Earls Court in 1895 and 1896. As a commercial enterprise, its main purpose was entertainment rather than education. One of the main attractions was a replica of an Indian town. Wooden buildings, which had once stood in the town of Pune, were reconstructed to recreate what one of the organisers claimed was ‘a really typical and realistic Indian village’. Nevertheless, a slight air of unreality must have been added by the mock-Indian jungle at its centre, decorated with life-size model tigers, crocodiles, snakes and elephants. The narrow streets were lined with shops populated by ‘eighty-five Indian craftsmen, including silk and carpet weavers’ who were brought over from India. In addition, over one hundred jugglers and dancers performed in the streets and animal keepers wandered about, leading behind them specially imported camels, elephants and cattle.57 Outside the Indian city, the visitor could sample a Mughal ornamental garden filled with Indian flowers and trees, while snake charmers, fakirs and lion tamers provided entertainment.
The snake charmers’ cobras kept on dying, and Indian sailors had to be bribed to smuggle replacement snakes on to their boats. Large quantities of ghee were also imported, to feed all the Indian craftsmen and entertainers working at the exhibition. Unfortunately, the Indians did not take to British mutton and all the goats within the vicinity of Earls Court were quickly consumed. Men had to be employed solely for the purpose of travelling ever further afield to buy goats.58 While the organisers struggled to provide their workers with acceptable food, they fed their visitors Anglo-Indian curries. In the Curry House visitors could sample ‘Eastern dishes, prepared by a staff of Indian cooks, and placed before [them] by native servants’.59
Indian cafés and restaurants were a theme at many of these exhibitions. One enterprising Indian waiter, who worked in the Ceylon Tea House at Liverpool’s Royal Jubilee Exhibition in 1887 and at Glasgow’s International Exhibition the following year, published a cookery book: Curries and How to Make Them In England.
1 lb Coriander Seed
¼ lb Dry Chillies
½ lb Mustard Seed
2 oz. Garlic
½ lb Dried Peas
2 oz. Cumin Seed
½ pint Lucca Oil
¼ lb Saffron
¼ lb Pepper
2 oz. Dry Ginger
½ lb Salt
½ lb Brown Sugar
½ pint Vinegar
N.B. Few Bay Leaves in Ceylon and India. Use Carugapilbay or Curry Leaves, black.
Grind with vinegar. Put in jar. Cover with Lucca Oil. Use a large spoon for Madras Curries.60
Ironically, while Londoners enjoyed sampling the chaotic and exciting atmosphere of an Indian town at the Earls Court exhibition, the British who actually lived in India would not have dreamed of setting foot inside one. British cantonments were built at a safe distance away from the Indian townships. One member of the Raj remembered that as a little girl the Indian town was forbidden to her, even though she longed to ride her pony under the gates into that ‘mysterious and fascinating’ world.61
The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924–5 was one of the most successful of all the exhibitions. During its course, 27 million people travelled, as it were, from one end of the empire to another. The Indian section, housed in a pavilion modelled on the Taj Mahal, had the usual mock jungle, jugglers and snake charmers, a display of shikar trophies, a model of the Khyber Pass, and a jumble of Indian goods, including carpets, silks, indigo and tea. The café served curries and pilaus, and the visitor could enjoy a cup of Indian tea ‘under the trees on the north side of the grounds among typical Indian scenery’.62 It was run by Edward Palmer, the founder of E. P. Veeraswamy & Co., Indian Food Specialists, who imported spices, chutneys and curry pastes from India and sold them under the label ‘Nizams’. The company may have been named for Palmer’s grandmother, one of the Indian wives of his grandfather, William Palmer, who founded the banking house of Palmer & Co. at Hyderabad in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, Edward Palmer came from a family of men who had served in India and married Indian women. His great-grandfather, also William, married the beautiful Muslim princess Begum Fyze Baksh, and a painting of the family by Johann Zoffany hangs in the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library today.
Palmer had an interest in producing authentic Indian food. In a cookery book which he published in 1936, he insisted that it was possible, using his curry powder, to make a ‘proper curry . . . equal to the very best made in India’, as long as the cook fried or grilled the powder to rid it of its raw taste before adding it to the dish. He also specified that flour should ‘on no account’ be used to thicken curries and that apples and sultanas did not belong in a curry.63 When the Wembley exhibition closed Edward decided to establish the café in a permanent home at 101 Regent Street, and Veeraswamy’s opened in 1926. The successor to Sake Dean Mahomed’s Hindostanee Coffee House, it is the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in Britain today. Decorated with lights from the Maharaja of Mysore’s palace, cane chairs and potted palms, it retained the Raj atmosphere of the exhibition café. The waiters were specially imported from India, and wore the bearers’ uniforms of British India. The food which the restaurant served was also firmly Raj: duck vindaloo and Madras curry. The restaurant was patronised by nostalgic Anglo-Indians and the rich and fashionable, including the Prince of Wales.
This is a fresh chutney which should be made just before it is required. It is difficult to give precise amounts for the ingredients in this sort of dish. It is best to keep tasting it and adjust the flavour as you make it. It tastes good with idlis (you can buy packet mixes from Indian grocers if making them from scratch seems intimidating). It is also good as a side dish with coconut-based curries and with grilled fish.
Large bunch of fresh green coriander (the size you can buy at vegetable markets rather than the tiny packets you can buy in supermarkets)
100–200ml coconut milk, or fresh coconut, grated
1–6 fresh green chillies, chopped
1cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped
2–3 cloves of garlic, chopped
a handful of raw peanuts (if you only have salted ones, add less salt)
salt to taste
sugar to taste
lemon or lime juice to taste
Wash the coriander and blend it in a food mixer with the other ingredients until it is smooth. Add more coconut milk or lemon juice if you need extra liquid. Keep tasting and when it is sharp, tangy, bright green and smooth it is ready.
