Down at the far end of Greek Street from L’Escargot, Crowley's favourite Chinese restaurant was the Shanghai at number 8 (now the Japanese Knife Centre) next to the former Pillars of Hercules pub. Founded in 1924, this was a fairly Spartan establishment but with an extensive menu, and decorated with Chinese characters on scrolls. He also went occasionally to Ley-On's at the corner of Gerrard Street and Wardour Street, in those days the most popular and best-known Chinese in the area, and he liked Young's, then at 178 Wardour Street, where he sometimes went with his last partner Alice.
Crowley had a strong taste for Asian food in general. Indian restaurants were still not common in Britain. Crowley went to Shafi's at 18 Gerrard Street (one of the earliest, founded in 1920) and to Dilkush at 4 Windmill Street in Fitzrovia, opposite the Fitzroy Tavern. Veeraswamy's was a high-class pioneer in the field (and still there on Regent Street). Churchill, Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin all ate there, but Crowley was not impressed. In 1941 he recorded that he had tried it again after a seven-year absence and found it “coarse and bad as ever”. The following year he accused them of serving rabbit as chicken.
Although Crowley had real, down-to-earth experience of the Far East, his taste for Asian food involved strong elements of exoticism and orientalism. This was true of his taste for curry, which was part of a more general taste for extremes (“I want blasphemy, murder, rape, revolution, anything, bad or good, but strong”). In a very British fashion this had elements of the comic ordeal (long part of the British attitude, with people boasting about eating “the Brick Lane ring stinger” and so on) and even of the practical joke: entertaining a friend in 1936 he writes “Bracewell put through Ordeal by Curry.”
Dylan Thomas gives this attitude a further surreal twist, writing to a friend in 1937:
Last week, a man called Mulk Raj Anand1 made a big curry for everybody… The first course was beans, little ones. I ate two and couldn't speak. A little man called Wallace B. Nichols… took a whole mouthful and was assisted out… After the main dish, which was so unbelievably hot that everyone, except the Indian, was crying like Shirley Temple, a woman, Mrs Henderson, looked down onto her plate and saw, lying at one corner of it, a curious rubbery thing that looked like a red, discarded French letter. In interest, she picked it up and found it was the entire skin from her tongue.
Anand had written to Crowley a few years earlier (from Sunningfields Road, Hendon, north west London) on this very subject of extreme curry, wanting to cite Crowley in his own forthcoming book.2 On his first page he quotes the Confessions on Singapore curries: “They sting like serpents, stimulate like strychnine; they are subtle and sensual like Chinese courtesans, sublime and sacred, inscrutably inspiring and unintelligibly illuminating, like Cambodian carvings.”
Dining at Crowley's, another friend remembered
at the first mouthful I thought I had burned my tongue with caustic acid… Crowley, however, shovelled an enormous plateful away… fortifying it as he went with chillies and other spices… sweat pouring down his face… He explained that he had learnt about real curry in India, Burma and Ceylon, that its object was to produce sweating, hence a cooling process… He pointed out that this was only one of many cooling processes he was familiar with in these lands and that one of the great points of hospitality was to have one's partes viriles lifted up by a maiden attendant, and fanned from below with an exquisitely painted fan… He assured me that I would soon get to enjoy such things, as well as curry, once I got out there, to say nothing of the delights of opium, hashish and heroin.
Louis Umfreville Wilkinson,3 whom Crowley said was his best friend in later life, remembered Crowley curries as “astounding”, but “rather too moving for me” (possibly a euphemism) “though I ate them with joy for their very excessiveness.”
Crowley's interest in food and drink inspired him to think of opening restaurants. In the Thirties he was floating the idea of a Black Magic Restaurant or Bar 666, with a “unique aesthetic”: there would be goats’ heads and skulls, and lights that would “come on automatically when certain objects are approached.” Another plan outlines atmospheric ideas including situation (“Obscure ill-famed quarter, but not too inaccessible. Narrow dark alley”) and furnishing (“Furniture. No chairs or tables, but mattresses, armchairs, bolsters… dyed to appear dirty.”) In addition to these ideas of ghost-train engineering and psychological decor, he also planned to open an “Exotic Restaurant”, and here he was probably more sincere about the food. In 1936 he even got as far as investigating a possible site for it at 16 Clay Street, Marylebone, a fairly bleak back street (more than an alley, but not a mews) between Crawford Street and Dorset Street. Now largely redeveloped, it had no real ‘walk-by’ for casual customers but it could have worked for a deliberate ‘destination’ restaurant, as it could for a brothel.
Crowley's diaries frequently record dishes at home such as “Zambar of Lobster: Iced”. That was one hot day in the summer of 1936 (zambar was ready-made spiced lentil powder he bought in tins, along with tins of Madras curry powder and jars of vindaloo paste; and eating curry chilled seems to have been a once popular practice). Sometimes the boat was really pushed out: “Altogether my lunch was memorably exotic: cooked by host himself in a Bloomsbury flat”.
chilli con carne – Mexican dish so hot that it makes strong men weep. With it were four “side-dishes” – concoctions based on (a) red macassar fish & poppy-seed (b) tamarind-fish (c) Burmese balichow made from rotten prawns (bottled, very Spilsburyesque) (d) Kasoondee – minced mango in spiced oil.
“Spilsburyesque” is nice: Sir Bernard Spilsbury was a leading forensic pathologist, and his famous cases included identifying Dr Crippen's wife from her remains.
He was always devising new dishes, typically with chillies and cayenne pepper:
Pot au feu Ang-Kor…4 Cocotte: bed of bhindi with chillis. Middle layer: prawns and chillis in vindalu; top, chillis and Chinese onions.
My new savoury. Fried rye bread smear with Chinese chili sauce grilled sardines top with egg fried in olive oil.
My savoury. Fried bread smeared with tamarind fish paste. On this grill anchovies and sardines alternate. Over this yolk of egg scrambled with cayenne.
Gold fish toast. Brown bread and dripping nearly toasted. Add stripes of red chilli and anchovies: finish.
My Almond Chicken. Steep cold chicken in red & green (or bird's eye) chillis. Add Bamboo pickle (in oil), Col. Skinner's Chutney,5 & lots of almonds. Stew it all up. Oh boy!