References

Introduction

1 Patak’s Indian Foods has received orders from curry-deprived British scientists studying penguins in the Antarctic. Shops in St John’s, Newfoundland, stock Indian spices. Beijing has more than forty Indian restaurants, while in Warsaw a curry club meets monthly to sample curry in that city’s restaurants.

2 A survey of eleven curry powders sold in the UK and the US found that all contained cumin, fenugreek and turmeric; ten also included coriander seeds. The next most popular ingredients were cloves, fennel seeds and ginger (found in seven powders); garlic and red pepper (six); black pepper (five); curry leaves, cardamom, cinnamon, nutmeg and white pepper (four); chillies, mustard seed and poppy seed (two); and anise, Bengal gram, cassia buds, celery seeds, dill seeds, mace, onion and triphala (a herb used in Ayurvedic medicine, one). The Madras curry powders surveyed did not contain ‘warm’ or ‘aromatic’ spices such as cardamom, cloves and nutmeg and usually included curry leaves and chillies.

3 One being that a Scotsman in Bombay named Curry liked food made with chillies so much that the dishes were named after him; another that the word curry comes from cuirreach gosht, which means racetrack meal in Irish, so named because an Irish sea captain gambled away his wife’s fortune, forcing the family to sell some horses and eat the rest.

4 Pietro Della Valle, The Travels of Pietra Della Valle in India, from the old English Translation of 1664, cited in David Burnett and Helen Saberi, The Road to Vindaloo: Curry Books and Curry Cooks (Totnes, 2008), p. 12.

1 The Origins of Curry

1 The Indian subcontinent also comprises Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Nepal and the island of Sri Lanka, which were once part of British India. In this book, India refers to the entire region. Political boundaries are rarely commensurate with linguistic or gastronomical borders, and there is no clear demarcation line between the food of India and its neighbours.

2 Iqitdar Husain Siddiqi, ‘Food Dishes and the Catering Profession in Pre-Mughal India’, Islamic Culture, LIV/2 [Hyderabad] (April 1985), pp. 117–74.

3 K. T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (New Delhi, 1994), p. 154.

4 Emma Roberts, Scenes and Characteristics of Hindoostan, with Sketches of Anglo-Indian Society, 2nd edn (London, 1837), vol. I, p. 75.

5 Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (Oxford, 2006), pp. 115–16.

2 Britain

1 Quoted in Jo Monroe, Star of India: The Spicy Adventures of Curry (Chicester, 2004), p. 136. However, a 1998 survey found that curry was only the sixth most popular dish behind fish and chips, steak and chips, chicken, lasagne and roast dinner.

2 Anon., Modern Domestic Cookery (London, 1851), p. 311, quoted in Susan Zlotnick, ‘Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England’, Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, XV1/2–3, p. 5.

3 F. W. Moorman, Songs of the Ridings (London, 1918) on alt-usage-english.org/ucle/Moorman

4 ‘Curry’, in The Humorous Poetry of the English Language, ed. James Parton (New York, 1857), pp. 474–5. Quoted in Zlotnick, Domesticating Imperialism, p. 10.

5 This was one of a series of exhibitions that began with the Great Exhibition of 1851 in the Crystal Palace. The Empire of India Exhibition in Earls Court, 1895–6, featured a replica of an Indian town, a Moghul garden, snake charmers and a curry house.

6 E. P. Veeraswamy, Indian Cookery (Mumbai, 2001), pp. 9–11.

3 The Colonies: The United States, Canada and Australia

1 Molly O’Neill, ‘Long Ago Smitten, She Remains True to the Country Captain’, New York Times, 17 April 1991; Sam Sifton, ‘Master Class’, The New York Times Magazine, 25 January 2009, pp. 47–8.

2 Jane Holt, ‘News of Food’, New York Times, 16 January 1941.

3 Craig Claiborne, ‘Dining at the Fair’, New York Times, 27

June 1964.

4 Quoted in Craig Claiborne, ‘As an Indian Cook Tells it, Curry Powder is the Villain’, New York Times, 30 May 1974.

5 The historical information and quotations in this section come from the excellent article by Mary F. Williamson, ‘Curry: A Pioneer Canadian Dish’, Multiculturalism, 1979 II/3, pp. 21–4.

6 Quoted in Barbara Santich, In the Land of the Magic Pudding: A Gastronomic Miscellany (Kent Town, 2000), p. 80.

7 Danny Katz, ‘The Culinary Revolution that Just Won’t Quit’, 20 March 2005, theage.com.au.

5 Africa

1 Indians, mainly from Bengal and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts, accounted for 36 per cent of the early slaves, compared with 31.5 per cent from Indonesia and 37 per cent from Africa, mainly Guinea and Madagascar. Frank R. Bradlow and Margaret Cairns, The Early Cape Muslims: A Study of their Mosques, Genealogy and Origins (Cape Town, 1978), p. 102. Other Indians were captured and taken by the Dutch to Indonesia as slaves.

2 Hilda Gerber, Traditional Cookery of the Cape Malays (Amsterdam and Cape Town, 1957), p. 10.

3 Laurens Van der Post, African Cooking (New York, 1970), p. 136.

4 Said Hamdun and Noël King, Ibn Battuta in Black Africa (Princeton, 1994), cited on congocookbook.com.

6 South-east Asia

1 Quoted in David Thompson, Thai Food (Berkeley, CA, 2002), p. 24.

2 Ibid., p. 275.

3 Jennifer Brennan, The Cuisines of Asia (New York, 1984), p. 36.

7 Other Regions

1 Anneke H. Van Otterloo, ‘Chinese and Indonesian Restaurants and the Taste for Exotic Food in the Netherlands: A Global-local Trend’, Asian Food: The Global and the Local, ed. Katarzyna Cwiertka with B. Walraven, (Honolulu, 2001), pp 153–66.

2 Today French butchers still flavour their pâtés with quatres épices made from pepper, cloves, ginger and nutmeg – a legacy of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when spice use was fashionable.

3 The normal Japanese word for cooked rice is gohan, which is used only when rice is eaten with chopsticks from a bowl.

4 Quoted in Keiko Ohnuma, ‘Curry Rice: Gaijin Gold: How the British Version of an Indian Dish Turned Japanese’, Petits Propos Culinaires, VIII (1966), p. 8.

5 Richard F. Hosking, ‘India–Britain–Japan: Curry-Rice and Worcester Sauce’, Hiroshima Shudo University Research Review, VIII (1992).