and Indian takeaways
THERE ARE ABOUT eight thousand Indian restaurants in Britain and the great majority of these are run by Bangladeshis. Most of these Bangladeshis come from the Seaman’s Zone at the centre of the small district of Syhlet.
Syhlet is a predominantly Muslim, jungly, tea-growing district on the north-eastern border with Assam. During the Mughal period the district was known for the sweet oranges that grew there, and the Emperor Jahangir noticed that ‘in the province of Syhlet, which is a dependency of Bengal, it was the custom for the people of those parts to make eunuchs of some of their sons and give them to the governor in place of revenue’.1 It was where Thackeray’s grandfather made his fortune by capturing elephants to sell to the East India Company. The British particularly liked the sweet oranges, but it is not an area famous for culinary achievements. The most distinctive speciality from Syhlet is rotten punti fish. The fish, which abounds in the lakes that cover the region, is put into earthenware pots and covered with mustard oil, and then the pots are sealed and buried in the ground. By the time they are dug up again, the fish has fermented into an oily paste which the Syhletis fry with chillies and eat as a pickle, or add to fish curries to give them a ‘cheesy flavour’.2
During the Raj, Syhlet was strategically important due to a series of waterways flowing through the district which provided a short cut between the Assam tea plantations and the port of Calcutta. In the 1840s, the British introduced steamships into these byways and rivers. The Syhleti boatmen, who until now had made a living paddling serenely along the peaceful waterways, found themselves stoking the fires down in the engine rooms of the steamships. Many set off for Calcutta in search of work. A change in the shipping regulations in 1849 meant that the demand for cheap and hard-working lascars, as Indian sailors are known, had increased enormously.3 Syhlet’s surplus boatmen found employment on the ocean-going steamships. Their lack of education meant that they were unable to get the more desirable deck work which required a knowledge of English because the deckhands needed to be able to communicate with the British officers. Instead, Syhletis were employed in the engine rooms where it was nerve-grindingly noisy. The job of stoking the huge boilers with coal was unbearably hot and on occasion men would die of heatstroke. Worse still, the boilers were prone to exploding, maiming and killing the firemen. Such appalling work was not well rewarded. In 1937, a Syhleti fireman earned £2.1.0. a month, one-fifth of the wages of a white fireman. Even during the Second World War, when lascars were risking their lives on the boats, they were paid a war bonus of only £2 compared to £10 for white sailors.4 Given the conditions and the poor wages it is unsurprising that these Syhleti firemen were notorious for jumping ship. They could be found eking out a living in all the major ports from Rangoon and Singapore to Southampton and New York.5
For lascars, a network of grubby boarding houses, run by ex-sailors and their wives, had existed in London’s East End since the nineteenth century. These were the places where the missionary Joseph Salter discovered lascars smoking opium and gambling away their earnings. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these boarding houses were a little more respectable. One of the most famous was run by Mr Ali, a Bengali, who had set it up with the help of his shipping company on the Victoria Dock Road, Canning Town. Nearby, he ran a small coffee shop, where the seamen could buy curry and rice.
During the 1920s and 30s, a number of others followed Mr Ali’s example and by the beginning of the 1940s there were boarding houses and cafés catering for the Syhleti seamen at Sandy Row, Brick Lane, New Road and Commercial Road. These seamen’s cafés were the roots from which Indian restaurants in Britain were to grow.6 They were meant to cater for ordinary seamen waiting for their ships to sail, but they also provided a support network for the steady trickle of deserters. Razaur Rahman Jagirdar, for example, jumped ship during a bombing raid on London in the 1940s. He spent a terrifying night out on the streets with the bombs dropping around him. In the morning he was relieved to find the Syhleti café on Commercial Road. From there he was directed to the basement Gathor Café at 36 Percy Street, in the West End. Here he discovered what was in effect ‘a Community centre for the Syhletis’. Through the café he found somewhere to live: a terraced four-bedroom house which he shared with between thirty-five and forty other Syhletis.7 Overcrowded and poor accommodation was the norm for deserting seamen. Nawab Ali, who jumped ship in Cardiff during the war, ended up sleeping on a fold-out bed in the kitchen of a house on Commercial Road. It was also difficult to find work. One Syhleti seaman, who lived in London in the 1930s, recalled that his fellow boarders made their money by raffling chocolate in pubs, peddling clothes, or selling toffee on the streets.8 Most jobs were in catering. Nearly all of the 150 Syhletis known to Razaur Rahman Jagirdar in the West End worked as kitchen porters, cleaners or washers-up, in restaurants, clubs and hotels.9
Like the majority of his fellow Syhletis, Nawab Ali began his career in catering – cleaning, washing up and peeling potatoes – working in an Egyptian coffee shop on Cannon Street Road. Through a friend he moved on to the Savoy, where he kept the kitchen clean, and then on to Veeraswamy’s, where he was given the task of putting rice on the plates. He was instructed to put one cupful on each plate, but the customers rarely ate all of it. ‘The rice that came back used to fill two dustbins, and I didn’t like the rice to go in the dustbin.’ Rice is the most important ingredient in any Bangladeshi meal, and Bangladeshis hate to waste it. To throw away rice is like throwing away money.10 Nawab Ali therefore reduced the amount he put on each plate and compensated by spreading the rice around the plate instead. On a visit to the kitchens the owner noticed what he was doing and was pleased to discover such economising initiative among his staff. He left Ali a generous tip and gave him a rise. Unfortunately, this made him unpopular with the rest of the staff, and, as he did not like quarrelling, he left the job.11
Veeraswamy’s was one of a handful of Indian restaurants in London in the 1940s. An offshoot from the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, it served Anglo-Indian curries to rich and fashionable Londoners and retired civil servants who felt nostalgic for their old home. A one-time general secretary of the Pakistan Caterers Association can also remember a restaurant known as Abdullah’s, somewhere around Old Compton Street in the 1920s. This was run by ‘an expert cook . . . from Bombay’, and Buckingham Palace were even said to have placed orders with Abdullah who had been recommended to them by the Indian Secretary of State.12 Two other restaurants catered to London’s population of Indian students. Shafi’s on Gerard Street might as well have been the London Indian Student Centre. The middle-class equivalent of the Gathor Café on Percy Street, it was a comforting home from home for lonely students. The young author Atia Hosain, who had stayed on in London after 1947 as she was reluctant to return to a partitioned India, spent a lot of time at Shafi’s ‘because it was a rendezvous for Indians’. She came from a Muslim family for whom ‘food and companionship went naturally together, Shafi’s was like being back home. The owner was host, friend and confidant to all who came, whether to eat or just to relax and talk. Never in India had I found myself alone at a meal. It would have been unthinkable not to share food with friends and relatives.’13 Shafi’s was set up in 1920 by the Mohammed brothers from northern India. They came to Britain to study but, having discovered that Indian food was hard to find, they saw a good market opportunity and went into business. Bir Bahadur was another Indian student from Delhi, who opened up the Kohinoor on Roper Street in the West End. His restaurant was so successful that he brought his brothers Sordar and Shomsar over from India to help him establish a chain. By 1948, there was a Bahadur Taj Mahal in Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and Northampton.14 These pioneering Indian restaurants all employed ex-seamen in their kitchens and an extremely high proportion of the Syhletis living in Britain in the 1940s and 50s worked in them at one time or another. It was the ambition of many of the seamen to set up restaurants of their own and
The Kohinoor . . . was the main training centre for many Bangladeshis for[a] long time. All the Bahadur brothers were kind hearted, they never took advantage of the poverty of their employees and always treated them well. Nearly all the first generation of Bangladeshis who owned Indian restaurants in the UK in the earlier days, learnt their trade from the Bahadur brothers. They learnt the skill of cooking and serving, also management, step by step. Even those who worked for Veeraswamy’s restaurant or other Indian restaurants also came to Bahadur at last to have their final training.15
By the end of the war there were plenty of bombed-out cafés in need of renovation. The Syhleti seamen used their hard-earned savings to buy up these derelict cafés and small, down-at-heel fish-and-chip shops. Britain’s ethnic minorities were already well established in the fish-and-chip trade. The earliest fish fryers had been Jewish immigrants to London’s East End, and virtually all the fish-and-chip shops in Scotland and Ireland were owned by Italian immigrants. In the 1950s and 60s, Chinese and Greek Cypriot immigrants, as well as Syhletis, began buying them up.16 The Syhletis would often spot a good location by looking out for a Chinese takeaway. They knew that ‘if they opened a restaurant where there was a successful Chinese it would do well’.17 When fish and chips were first sold in the nineteenth century, they were seen as slum food, the sort of thing prostitutes ate as they came off the beat. But they were gradually taken up by the working classes and by the 1950s they made a welcome change for many families from the monotony of roast on Sunday, hash on Monday, cottage pie on Tuesday, hotpot on Thursday and stewed steak and chips on Friday. In working-class towns there would be a rush on the fish-and-chip shop after eleven o’clock as the men made their way home from the pub, and at the weekends they would be full of men buying a quick lunch on their way to the football game.18
The fish-and-chip shops’ new Syhleti owners gave them a fresh lick of paint, bought new tables and chairs, and set about building up custom. After he left Veeraswamy’s Nawab Ali followed this path. In 1943, after a spell of work in the factories in Coventry, he had saved enough money to buy a small coffee shop at 11 Settles Street. It was a good spot as it was near the Labour Exchange and ‘all kinds of different people’ would drop in – ‘English, Indians, Arabs, Africans’. He redecorated but did not change its name, or the menu, as he did not want to put off the old customers. ‘We sold tea, coffee, rice and curry, fish and chips – all the usual things.’19 Many Syhleti restaurant owners started out this way, and the names they gave their establishments – the Anglo-Asia or the Anglo-Pakistan – reflected the cultural mix of Syhleti owner and predominantly white customers. The Syhletis continued to provide their customers with the traditional fish and chips and hot pies, and simply tacked curry on to the old menu. They also continued the pattern of staying open after 11 p.m. to catch the trade as the pubs were closing. Unfortunately, this meant that they attracted plenty of drunken, bad-mannered and violent customers. Gradually, the white customers became more adventurous and started to try the curries. In this way the British working classes discovered that a good hot vindaloo went down particularly well on a stomach full of beer, and the tradition developed of eating a curry after a night out in the pub. As the customers became increasingly fond of curry, these small cafés and old chip shops jettisoned the British dishes from their menus and turned into Indian takeaways and inexpensive Indian restaurants.
Nawab Ali’s next venture was a Maltese café in Cardiff which he bought for £350, a price he negotiated with the help of a prostitute. Rather than trying to keep the old menu and the old style, he changed the name straight away, to the Calcutta restaurant, and offered an entirely Indian menu.20 A number of such ventures sprung up around Britain in the forties and fifties, usually with exotic-sounding names, like the Shah-Jalal and Khayam. Syhletis dominated the restaurant trade. Nawab Ali commented, ‘I will tell you why there were too many Syhletis. It was because we all helped each other: I brought twenty men myself, [before the war] . . . and I must have brought two hundred from the ship in the war, so if each of them helped twenty more . . . you see how it happened. Of course in those days we never imagined there would be so many people – we just wanted to help our brothers.’21 Engine-room crews were ‘close knit . . . all the men coming from neighbouring villages, and often related to one another’. This pattern of emigration had a profound impact on particular Syhleti villages. The first group of emigrants never intended to stay in Britain and many sailors and restaurant owners returned to their villages comparatively wealthy men. Known as ‘Londonis’ in Syhlet, they built themselves stone Londoni houses with indoor bathrooms and painted verandahs while the rest of the villagers continued to live in thatched mud huts. Land prices soared in the migrant districts and the women sang a song with the lines, ‘How can I accept that my husband has gone to London? . . . The land will be empty – what will I do?’22
After he jumped ship in 1937, Haji Shirajul Islam found work in a series of restaurants. First he prepared himself by practising reading a menu written in unfamiliar English, over and over again. This worked and he landed a job at the India Burma restaurant on Leicester Square. But he hated it: ‘Oh – morning to midnight you got to work . . . One calling this way another calling that way – what to do?’ He moved on to the Khayam restaurant off Tottenham Court Road, but here too the demands were too much for him. There were two flights of stairs between the restaurant and the kitchen which meant the waiters were constantly running up and down. The manager reminded him, when he was late one day, that he was expected to work a twelve-hour day. Indignant that ‘actually it was not twelve hours . . . fifteen hours, eighteen hours we worked’ (for fifteen shillings a week), he announced at half past nine in the evening that he had done his twelve hours and was leaving unless he was paid overtime. To his surprise he did not lose his job. The work was so hateful, however, that he left and lived off the Labour Exchange in between jobs on ships. After the war he was driven back into the restaurant business. But he returned to the business as a restaurant owner, which was not quite as bad.23 Each new wave of deserters followed a similar path to that of Haji Shirajul Islam. Thus, by the time South Asian immigration into Britain began to increase in the 1960s, the Syhletis already dominated the Indian food business in Britain.
They had, of course, acquired a new nationality by then. When India was partitioned at independence in 1947, east Bengalis, including Syhletis, became east Pakistanis overnight. After the Indo-Pakistan war in 1971 the Syhletis found their nationality had changed again: now they were Bangladeshis. Some Bangladeshi and Pakistani restaurant owners find it irritating to be labelled ‘Indian’ but many encourage the misunderstanding, as India conjures up romantic images in the mind of the British public. Syhletis have ensured that the restaurant business stays in their hands by training up their children. One restaurant owner lamented that, as soon as they were able, the children found themselves co-opted into their parents’ or some other relative or friend’s restaurant. Rather than spending their evenings doing their homework, ‘the poor Bangladeshi boys were kept awake until the late hours of night, cooking food or serving curry and rice to the customers’. Consequently, while they might have dreamed of becoming engineers or film stars, they have all become cooks, waiters and restaurant owners instead, and close to 90 per cent of Indian restaurants remain in Syhleti hands.24
In the 1950s and 60s the early restaurants were frequented by ‘English people who had been in the civil Service and all that’. One restaurant owner remembered that ‘they used to like sometimes if we called them “Sahib”, you know . . . they used to be very happy . . . so we wanted to have a little more tip, so why not? They used to call “Bearer! . . . Bearer!” Nowadays these fellows if anybody called them “Bearer”, they wouldn’t serve him – they would say “Go out of this restaurant!”’ Indian restaurants also became very popular among the student population. The ‘cheap, tasty, and plentiful’ food suited undergraduate needs perfectly. The anthropologist Jack Goody recalled that before the war ‘under graduates [in Cambridge] could sign out from a meal in college and use the savings to buy a restaurant meal’. They would go to the Chinese or Indian restaurants. Many of today’s Indian restaurant regulars discovered the food during the fifties, when they were students. The food writer Michael Boddy remembered how he and his friends ‘would congregate at Indian restaurants . . . I remember Madras curries, the chicken pillaus, chappatties like large grey elephant’s ears, saffron rice and pickles . . . the food was not very good. In fact, looking back on it, it was awful, the greasy-spoon side of Indian cooking.’ But then ‘the cooks were generally off ships and cooking curries was a way of making a living until something better came along’.25
It was not unknown for the early restaurants simply to buy in catering-size jars of curry paste which the cooks then used as a basis for all the different dishes. The menus were copied from Veeraswamy’s, Shafi’s and the Bahadur brothers’ chain of restaurants, where the first Syhleti restaurant owners had learned their trade. Veeraswamy’s served the curries loved by Anglo-Indians: coloured pilau rice; sour vindaloos, hot with chillies; creamy chicken kormas, thickened with almonds; hot Madras curries, spiked with lemon juice; dopiazas, thick with fried onions; and sweet yellow Parsee dhansaks. The Bahadur brothers and the various owners of Shafi’s followed the lead of the few restaurants that existed in northern India, serving a version of Anglo-Indian, Punjabi and Mughlai cuisine, which included chicken biryanis, rogan joshes, mushroom curries and spinach and potato side dishes. This ensured that, while in India Mughlai cookery never became a national cuisine, outside India Mughlai dishes were regarded as the national food of all Indians.
The restaurants appealed to their customers as inexpensive places where the food was served promptly. These were not the ideal conditions under which to cook Indian food. In perfect circumstances, all the spices used should be freshly ground on a grinding stone, the dish should be cooked slowly and carefully, in a number of stages, allowing the flavours of the spices to be fully absorbed before the next step in the cooking process is begun. Sophisticated dishes such as biryanis or dum pukht recipes, which aim to produce meat so tender that it slips from the bone, require very slow cooking, preferably in a bed of hot ashes with hot coals placed on the lid of the cooking pot. Under pressure from their impatient customers, Indian cooks invented a number of short cuts which enabled them to serve cheap, quick and tasty meals. Rather than using a paste of freshly ground onions, they used ‘boiled onion paste’. This is made from puréed onions cooked in their own moisture without oil. It gives a good thick base for a curry sauce but imparts a slightly raw onion flavour which is one of the distinctive tastes of Indian restaurant food.26 The curry sauces were prepared well in advance, using pre-ground packaged spices, and a variety of flavour enhancers – asafoetida, fenugreek seeds, tomato purée or ketchup, sugar, puréed mango chutney and monosodium glutamate – to compensate for the lack of fresh ingredients.27 When the meals were being prepared in the kitchen, pre-cooked lamb or chicken, rice, onions and the sauce were assembled to create a biryani; a dash of cream and some chicken created a korma; varying quantities of chilli powder were added to produce jalfrezis and vindaloos. A good dash of food colouring gave the dishes their appealing bright red or yellow appearance. Brightly coloured food has become so much a part of the British experience of Indian food that when the cooks attempt to reduce the food colouring or leave it out, they find the customers send the food back with indignant complaints that it has not been prepared ‘properly’.28
A code developed which assigned new meanings to traditional titles for Indian dishes. Thus korma came to signify a mild creamy dish, dhansak meant a slightly sweet lentil curry and vindaloo simply indicated that the food would be very hot. The customers have come to expect a standardised menu, whichever Indian restaurant or takeaway they visit. Predictability is part of the appeal. Many regulars stick to one or two dishes which they always eat whenever they go ‘out for an Indian’.
In the 1960s, global capitalism created the conditions for the spread of Indian food throughout the British population. On one side of the equation the poverty of many people in the newly formed Asian nations, and their willingness to take on menial and unpleasant jobs at unsociable hours, combined with British industrial expansion to encourage increased immigration. Between 1956 and 1958 British immigration laws were changed. Bangladeshis were now able to apply for British passports, and the immigrants already established in the UK brought their families over to join them. There was plenty of work. Pakistanis from the Punjab arrived in the northern towns of Manchester and Bradford to take on night-shift work in the textile factories. It was illegal for women to work at night and white men regarded textile work as women’s work. Similar prejudices meant that the rapidly expanding food-processing, plastics, man-made textiles and rubber industries in west London could not find enough workers. The firms advertised in newspapers in India for labour and by the mid-sixties Asians from the subcontinent made up 12 per cent of Southall’s population. In Tower Hamlets, Bangladeshis took on work in the rag trade which white workers also scorned.29 Metal works and car-production factories in Birmingham similarly absorbed Asian labour. Punjabi Muslims and Sikhs, Gujaratis and Pakistanis added to the swelling community of Bangladeshi Syhletis. Brutal Africanisation programmes in the early seventies resulted in the arrival of many ‘twice migrant’ Indian families from Kenya and Uganda.30
The growing Asian immigrant community in London stimulated the growth of a little India around Drummond Street, near Euston station. Here, Asian grocers supplied the Bangladeshis with bitter gourds, and fresh hilsa fish to make jhol, their favourite dish. This is a watery stew made with hilsa, aubergines and potatoes. Eating food produced in their home country was very important to Bangladeshis. It enabled them to absorb the essences of Bangladeshi soil and maintain a sustaining link with home.31 Ambala Sweets sold a range of fudgy barfis made from milk boiled down until it forms a thick paste, powdery laddus made from chickpea flour or nuts and sugar, and crispy gulab jamans coated in a delicate rose-water syrup with a soft and melting milky filling. It was on Drummond Street that the ‘twice migrant’ Pathak family (now a household name as Patak’s) set up their first British shop, selling vegetables, spices, samosas and jars of pastes and pickles. This Gujarati family had moved to Kenya where they ran a sweet shop before they moved on to Britain. The Diwani Bhelpuri House, with its Formica-topped tables and stainless-steel plates, bowls and cups, recreated the atmosphere of a Bombay office workers’ eating house in London. It won awards and helped to popularise Indian vegetarian food in Britain.32 Not far from Portman Square, the old site of the Hindostanee Coffee House, Drummond Street in the late 1960s was a small piece of the Indian subcontinent transported to London.
From the late nineteenth century until well after the Second World War the British diet was dominated by an emphasis on red meat, accompanied by plain boiled potatoes, carrots or cabbage. Behramji Malabari, who visited in the 1890s, remarked that the British were exceptionally ‘slow of imagination and wanting in taste’ when it came to food. ‘As a rule the Englishman’s dinner is plain and monotonous to a degree. The cook knows nothing of proportion in seasoning his food; knows little of variety, and has a rough slovenly touch.’33 For a large section of the British population a good and ‘proper’ meal consisted of a hearty meat soup or meat and two ‘veg’.34 Olive oil was regarded as a medicine, not a cooking ingredient. It was bought at the chemist’s and kept in the medicine cabinet. It was rubbed on to sore skin or swallowed by the teaspoonful like cod liver oil.
After curry’s heyday in the Victorian period, a prejudice developed against curry as ‘spicy and disagreeable to respectable middle-class English stomachs’. Curries were also thought of as smelly dishes to cook which was a consideration in the 1950s when middle-class kitchens moved up from the basement into the main living area of the house. In the fifties and sixties, the closest many ever came to eating Indian food was the ‘touch of curry powder in the weekly stew’. Those curries that were produced were extremely British: ‘made with Vencatachellum [curry] powder with swollen sultanas in it and ground minced beef’.35 The curry was either served in the middle of a ring of white rice, or spooned round a pile of white rice in the centre of the plate, although in many homes curry was eaten with potatoes and vegetables rather than with rice. Rice was something most housewives would ‘never have dreamed of serving except as a pudding’. Curry was also eaten with chips, probably due to the fact that many working-class people first encountered curry in Syhleti-run fish-and-chip shops, and initially ate their curries as a sauce on their chips, rather than with rice.36 The most distinctive thing about British curries of the sixties and seventies was that they were almost invariably flavoured with dollops of chutney and fruit. When the comedian Jeremy Hardy joked that, apart from pineapples, apples and sultanas, ‘white mothers’ even add jam to their curries, he was not entirely wrong. In 1916, the Australian Household Guide recommended that a curry could be improved by adding rhubarb, bananas and ‘a spoonful of jam as a substitute for apple’.37 Apricot jam also appeared in vaguely oriental concoctions such as coronation chicken, served at Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation lunch in 1953. This mixture of cold chicken, mayonnaise, curry powder, apricot jam or mango chutney and sometimes cream, grated carrot and pineapple, was reminiscent of Anglo-Indian dishes such as Lady Minto’s Soufflé de Volaille Indiénne. These inventive variations on curry as an exotic casserole were often preferred to ‘proper Indian food’.
1 lb topside steak cut into strips (or can use minced steak)
2 large stalks celery sliced
1 tablespoon soy sauce
1 tablespoon white vinegar
1 tablespoon oil
1 tablespoon brown sugar
1 cup water
2 whole cloves
2 heaped teaspoons curry powder
¼ teaspoon each of ground ginger, cinnamon and mixed herbs
3 heaped teaspoons fruit chutney
½ cup sultanas
¾ cup tomato juice
salt
8 whole black peppercorns
1 or 2 rings fresh or canned pineapple (diced)
Heat the oil in a large saucepan. Sauté the celery and the meat until well browned. Add the curry powder, stir and cook for 3 minutes. Add spices, tomato juice, chutney, soy sauce, vinegar and sugar. Stir well. Add remaining ingredients, stir well. Cover and simmer for 50 minutes. Serve with hot rice. Serves 4–6.
All this was to change in the 1960s and 70s: sex, drugs and rock and roll were accompanied by a revolution in British eating habits. In 1958 over two million Britains went abroad for their holidays. Travel expanded people’s horizons and made them open to new foods. ‘Little’ Italian restaurants became fashionable. Inside, a spurious ‘Italian’ atmosphere was created with dim lighting, red tablecloths and empty Chianti bottles used as candlesticks. The Italians dishing up spaghetti in these trattorias cautiously introduced olive oil and garlic into their cooking. After the austerity of the post-war years, food re-emerged as a middle-class status symbol. Now that middle-class women were themselves working in the kitchens, they relished the chance to show off by whipping up sophisticated and ‘authentic’ dishes for their dinner-party guests.38 Elizabeth David began her campaign to improve British eating habits and, in her bossy tone, persuaded the middle classes that the ‘authentic’ flavours of fresh basil and mozzarella were far better than tired dried mixed herbs and Cheddar cheese.39 Delicatessens opened, grocers increased their range, to provide for the demand for the new authentic ingredients necessary to make good Italian and French food. The middle classes looking for an affordable and interesting evening out began to explore the Indian restaurants. One writer remembered how his diet in the 1960s of ‘mince and potatoes, haddock and chips . . . cheese omelettes . . . mutton pies . . . lagers and lime’ had, by 1974, changed to ‘chicken bhunas . . . sweet and sour porks . . . lamb kebabs and . . . bottles of retsina’.40
The Syhletis responded by opening new restaurants and improving the quality of their cooking. Nawab Ali gave his Calcutta restaurant in Cardiff to a friend – who gambled it away – but he had soon set up another in Plymouth called the Bengal. Haji Shirajul Islam returned to the restaurant business by opening the Karachi in Russell Square and then another, larger version in Marchmont Street, so that his customers would no longer have to queue. This he sold, only to buy the Moti Mahal in Glendower Place and another in Chelsea.41 By 1970 there were two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain. Asian immigration, combined with British wealth, and an interest in the foods of other cultures, came together to make Indian restaurants part of the landscape of every British town, and curries part of the diet of virtually every British person.
The majority of the population living in the South Asian subcontinent would not have recognised the food served as Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi. In the early 1960s Margaret Orr Deas took an Indian friend to a restaurant. He politely remarked that ‘we have very different food in India’ and in the following days worked his way along all the Indian restaurants on Westbourne Grove trying to find something that approximated the food that he was used to at home.42 Besides the inexperience of the cooks, and the need to take short cuts, there was also the problem of unadventurous British palates. ‘In those days garlic was not liked at all; even coriander was frowned on.’43 The cooks produced milder, creamier dishes with far less chilli and black pepper than would have been used in India. Haji Shirajul Islam commented, ‘Of course the food is not like in Syhlet – there we use all fresh things, fresh spices, that makes a lot of difference, and the meat and fish and everything, all fresh.’ He never ate the curries prepared in his own restaurants, preferring to cook for himself at home. On the other hand, for a generation of Indians growing up outside India, this food was as authentically Indian as the food they ate in their homes. Haji Shirajul Islam’s son even preferred his father’s restaurant curries. ‘When he goes to the restaurant he eats Madras – hot one . . . Me I always eat in the house. When I offer him food he eats it, but he says it’s not tasty like restaurant food, because he’s the other way round now.’44 For generations of British customers, and even second-generation Indians, the vindaloos and dhansaks, tarka dhals and Bombay potatoes, are Indian food. In comparison, food cooked in an Indian home can seem disappointingly unfamiliar and lacking in restaurant tastes.
Distinctively British ways of eating Indian food have developed in the restaurants. Poppadoms and pickles would normally be eaten with the food in India. In Britain they are served as a starter as a way of fulfilling the European expectation that a meal should be divided into courses. Drinking beer with a curry is another very British practice. The idea is supposed to have originated at Veeraswamy’s with the King of Denmark, who is said to have sent a barrel of Carlsberg to the restaurant every Christmas, in order to ensure that he would always have lager to drink with his duck vindaloo. But the British in India had been drinking pale ale with their roast meat and curries since the late eighteenth century. Already in 1810 Thomas Williamson was of the opinion that ‘nothing can be more gratifying . . . after eating curry’.45 The men who discovered curry on the way home from the pub in the 1940s and 50s were also accustomed to the combination, and once Indian restaurants acquired licences they stocked beer and lager for their customers who had developed a liking for a few beers, a hot vindaloo and chips.
A new range of dishes have been invented in British Indian restaurants. The Gaylord restaurant in Mortimer Street, London, was probably the first restaurant to acquire a tandoor oven. In 1968, The Good Food Guide reported that they were using a ‘proper mud oven’ to produce ‘tandoori chicken masal’ and ‘authentic puddingy “nan”’ for 1/6.46 The tandoor is a dome-shaped clay or brick oven which is heated by a wood fire at the bottom. Marinated meat is cooked on skewers inside the tandoor, and nan breads are baked by pressing the dough on to its sides. This was a traditional Punjabi way of cooking and imparted a smoky rich taste to the food. Few Punjabis would have had a tandoor at home but the people used to take their food to a public tandoor where it was cooked for them.47 Other restaurants followed Gaylord’s lead and installed a tandoor which enabled them to liven up their menus with smoky roast chicken tikka. This led to the invention of chicken tikka masala, as described in the first chapter, when tandoori chicken was served in a tomato and cream sauce.
In the 1980s, Pakistani restaurateurs in Birmingham invented the balti. People love to joke that balti means bucket but those who take their baltis seriously insist that this is the name of the dome-shaped wok in which the curry is cooked. Although the dish is said to have originated in Kashmir, the restaurant balti unashamedly makes a virtue out of restaurant short cuts.48 It is made up of marinated and pre-cooked meat, added to a pre-prepared balti sauce, which is a version of Indian restaurant curry sauce made from puréed onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, a few ground spices and, most importantly, fresh coriander. Each balti is made distinctive by the way it is assembled. During the first stage of the cooking process a variety of different spices might be fried in oil before the sauce is added. Once the pre-cooked meat has been mixed with the sauce a range of different ingredients – fenugreek, slices of pineapple, lentils – are mixed in to create different baltis.49
While the food in Indian restaurants took on a life of its own, independent from the food of the Indian subcontinent, the decor projected a romanticised idea of India, teeming with elephants and maharajas. ‘All the restaurants had an exotic look about them,’ commented one of the pioneering restaurateurs, and Haji Shirajul Islam thought his new Karachi restaurant in Marchmont Street ‘one of the nicest restaurants’ at the time: ‘It was all canopies and things.’50 Many of the early restaurants took their lead from Veeraswamy’s. With its high ceilings and beautiful lights from the Maharaja of Mysore’s palace, Edward Palmer’s creation had an air of 1920s elegance. But in 1933 it was sold to another Englishman, who added more Raj touches, including three elephant stools of gold-plated wood. By the 1950s an Indian visitor to Britain thought it created ‘a stereotyped image of India’. ‘A tall Indian wearing a turban stood at the door. The interior was Oriental with embossed wallpaper and ornate brass vases . . . There seemed nothing authentic about the food. I thought it was specially prepared for the British palate. My host explained that the restaurant catered for people like him who felt nostalgic about India from time to time.’51 In many ways images of India had changed little from the days when Sake Dean Mahomed decorated the first Indian restaurant in Britain with specially made cane chairs, prints of Indian scenes and provided a separate hookah-smoking room. The hallmarks of Indian restaurants became red-and-gold flocked wallpaper, heavy carved and inlaid wooden furniture, coloured tablecloths, little Indian statues and tinny Indian music playing in the background. The badly paid waiters served the customers, in true British Raj style, with subservience mixed with an air of subtle defiance.
Meanwhile, Madhur Jaffrey had arrived in London, to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was allowed the use of the kitchen at her lodgings but she did not know how to cook. At her home in Delhi ‘food – good food – just appeared miraculously from somewhere at the back of our house’, announced by ‘a bearer, turbaned, sashed and barefooted’. Jaffrey sent imploring letters to her mother asking for help, and her mother obliged by sending detailed recipes and instructions back through the post. Like the nineteenth-century cooks before her, Jaffrey learned to adapt her mother’s recipes to the limitations of the ingredients available in London. She substituted lemon juice for tamarind, parsley for fresh coriander, and eventually became sufficiently accomplished to invite her friends round for her own versions of Mughlai cuisine.52 The fact that Jaffrey had to learn to adapt her recipes to the limitations of British grocers meant that when she began publishing her cookbooks her non-Indian readers found them particularly easy to use. But it was not until she went to New York that she became a cookery writer. In search of a supplementary income to help pay her children’s school fees she began writing food articles. This spiralled into a television cookery series for the BBC. Indian Cooking was broadcast several times in the early 1980s and, through Jaffrey’s books and programmes, the British public learned to cook Indian food at home. Looking back on this series she wrote: ‘The day after I made my Lemony Chicken with green Coriander, I was told that all green coriander in Manchester had sold out. People had more leisure and more money in their pockets. I was cooking real Indian food and the British yearned for it.’53
Like Madhur Jaffrey, Yousuf Choudhury found it was difficult to buy all the ingredients for Indian food in 1960s Britain. When he arrived in Birmingham from Syhlet in 1957, he used to buy his spices from ‘a chemist off the Coventry Road by Birmingham city football ground’. He and his uncle, and the nine other occupants of their three-bedroom house, retained a preference for freshly killed chickens, as opposed to the long-dead specimens available in British butchers. Live chickens were supplied by a group of dubious traders who hung out along the Varna Road, along with the prostitutes, on Sunday mornings. Thus it was possible to indulge in a little sexual dalliance while procuring dinner. But whoever had to carry the chickens home drew the short straw. ‘When we were on the bus, the chickens used to jump about, so whoever bought the chickens had to walk home.’ Eventually, Noor Ali of Babon-Gaon opened up an Indian grocery store on Wright Street, with others soon following, so that it was possible to buy betel leaf and the favourite Syhleti fruit, satkora, in the Bangladeshi-run grocers.54 As curries became more and more popular with the British, many Indian ingredients – fresh coriander, okra and a range of spices – began appearing in British supermarkets.55
The earliest convenience foods included curries. Vesta packet foods produced a dehydrated curry meal made with minced beef and the ubiquitous sultanas. A respondent to a survey on eating habits remembered how in 1953, aged fourteen, he ‘took a shine to Vesta packet meals, the first range of such dishes I recall. It must have seemed tres risqué to my mother, brought up on tripe, cow heel, ribs and M[eat] & 2 V[eg] . . . my mother was prepared to indulge my culinary whims, so on high days and holidays it was Vesta curry and rice dishes.’ These curries must have tasted similar to the unappetising dehydrated lightweight meals walkers take with them on long hikes.56 As convenience foods progressed from packets to frozen ready-made meals, curries kept pace. The spices and plentiful onions and garlic of Indian food made the processed meats and frozen vegetables much tastier. Frozen Indian meals were versions of Anglo-Indian pilaus and curries: rice, pieces of chicken and chunks of apple and pineapple flavoured with a sweet yellow curry powder; meat, fruit and sultanas ‘churned together in a bland curry sauce’. Indian food entrepreneurs responded to these terrible concoctions by producing their own. G. K. Noon had come to Britain in 1970 to make sweets for the Indian community in Southall. In 1988 he moved into frozen and chilled ready meals. He now supplies Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, and as a result is the thirty-fifth richest Asian in Britain. Shehzad Husain rang up Marks & Spencer’s to tell them how horrible their Indian ready meals were, only to find herself appointed consultant on their Indian food range, while the Pathak family expanded their pastes and pickle business which had begun on Drummond Street.57 By the end of the 1980s, Indian food was available in a huge variety of forms to every British supermarket shopper. In the unstable boom and bust of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, curry appealed to a British public which was hungry for stability and tradition. Indian food could not perhaps be classed as traditionally English, but it carried with it echoes of empire and Britain’s period of lost glory, and in 1984 a wave of Raj nostalgia swept over Britain with the screening of The Jewel in the Crown.
More than any other ethnic food, the British have made curry their own. These days it is considered an integral part of British culture. Going out for an Indian is such a British activity that the Asian comedians in Goodness Gracious Me poked fun at the British with a sketch on going out for an ‘English’. Each year the British spend at least £2 billion in Indian restaurants, while homesick British ex-patriots living in the South of France meet up for curry evenings. Marketing researchers for supermarkets no longer include standard curry paste in the ethnic foods category but treat it as a ‘mainstream British flavour’. In 1997 the British spent £7.7 million on mango chutney.58 When he was at Manchester United, David Beckham used to celebrate scoring a goal with chicken korma at the city’s Shimla Pinks Indian restaurant.59 Even that profoundly British institution, the pub, serves curry lunches. In 2002, the Observer newspaper made the point that curry is now a ‘British institution’ with a mock cover for a ‘Nation Forward Party’ magazine. A brutish-looking man in leather jacket and Union Jack T-shirt is pictured sitting down to an Indian meal while the slogans around him declaim: ‘Keep Curry British’ and ‘Bhuna! Naan! Pilau! Curry is your birthright.’60
As the Observer advert hinted, although the British eat vast amounts of curry, they are not always welcoming towards the Asians who make it for them. The lager-loutish tradition of rolling, uproariously drunk, into an Indian restaurant and proving one’s machismo by ordering the hottest vindaloo or phal possible, is one of the disturbing sides of the British relationship with Indian food.61 The consumption of large quantities of curry has not necessarily made the British any less racist. As the food writer Dorothy Hartley wrote in 1956, the British have an unfortunate habit of ‘naturalising’ any foreign dish that enters the culture. The British have thoroughly Anglicised Indian food, first with curry powder, apples and sultanas, and now with chicken tikka sandwiches and curry sauce on chips. In a strange creolisation of Russian and Indian, it is even possible to buy chicken Kiev filled with curry sauce. It can be argued that the prevalence of curry in the British diet is not a sign of a new multicultural sensitivity but rather is symptomatic of British insularity. The creolisation of ethnic foods by the British can be read as a sign that they are only capable of being cosmopolitan in their tastes, as long as they are able to integrate the ethnic dish into their thoroughly British food habits.62
British attitudes to India have begun to change. The old images of poverty and fading Raj grandeur have been replaced by computer technicians and modern call centres. The wealthy Indian middle class have begun to appear on our cinema screens in films like Monsoon Wedding. Bollywood has become fashionable and these days the British are cast as the bad guys in films such as Lagaan. As a result, the British have begun to look with new eyes at the Indian food which they have been consuming unthinkingly. The fact that Indian restaurant curries would be unrecognisable to many inhabitants of the subcontinent as Indian food, has begun to stimulate interest in authenticity, despite the fact that British restaurant food is simply another variation within a food world characterised by variety. The focus on authenticity fails to acknowledge that the mixture of different culinary styles is the prime characteristic of Indian cookery and that this fusion has produced a plethora of versions of Indian food from Mughlai to Anglo-Indian, from Goan to British Indian.
Restaurants have responded to the new interest by including ‘authentic’ dishes on their menus, and supermarkets place great emphasis on the ‘authenticity’ of the recipes they use for their ready-prepared meals – Marks & Spencer, for example, point out that all the spices for their new Discover India range are specially imported from India. The change is reflected in the new-style Indian restaurant. ‘Why do Indian restaurants have to be dark and dingy?’ asked Nav Kandola, manager of Five Rivers in Leamington Spa. His restaurant, described at the beginning of the book, is bright and open with chic waiters and a modern menu dotted with ‘authentic’ dishes such as Goan-style mussels. He sees his restaurant as a reflection of the new India, which is a ‘fast, modern place’. Just around the corner, Abdul Hamid has given in to the pressure for change and redecorated his restaurant, Kismet, with pale yellow walls which give the place a light and airy feel. Nevertheless, he regrets the demise of the red-and-gold flocked wallpaper, Indian music and waiters in costume. He is proud of his Syhleti background and felt that it was accurately represented by the atmosphere of exotic glamour. He is saddened by the disappearance of what he sees as traditional India, and can see nothing wrong with providing his customers with an oriental setting in which to eat their meal. For him this is not shallow multiculturalism, but a way of keeping his own culture alive within Britain.
The recent changes in Indian restaurants reflect the changes in patterns of Asian immigration into Britain. The gaudy but cheerful red-and-gold restaurants run by Syhleti sailors are gradually being replaced by a new-style restaurant, run by the second generation. A more recent wave of professional immigrants have begun to open high-class Indian restaurants where with small portions of beautifully presented food they have endeavoured to place Indian cuisine in the same bracket as cordon bleu French cuisine. They have been successful. Two Indian restaurants in London previously had Michelin stars: Tamarind and Zaika. In Zaika, modern trendy India is combined with a nostalgia for the Raj. The food is served by waiters in chocolate-brown Nehru jackets and the simple but immensely versatile peasant dish, khichari, has been reinvented as ‘Indian risotto’ made with red onions and coriander and topped with crispy prawns.63
There is a surprising level of hostility across the Indian restaurant divide with some of the rebranders of expensive Indian food dismissing the old-style restaurant owners as ‘Pakis and Banglis who are just junglee peasants with rough habits’. The traditional restaurateurs hit back with the retort that ‘These people are all rubbish. They are half castes, the bastard children who don’t know their own fatherlands, think they know better than us because they speak English. Real food is here and it is cheap.’64
