Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  The scruffy thatched bungalows huddled around the factory of Fort William, which had confronted the new arrival in Calcutta in the seventeenth century, had been replaced by a town of ‘Greek-like pillared mansions’ and churches, all laid out in elegant wide streets and squares with ‘the superb colonnaded and domed residence of the Governor-General of India’ dominating over it all.2 In the cool of the evenings the dusty parade ground, known as the maidan, was crowded with British gentlemen taking the air on horseback and a scattering of ladies in tonjons (open carriages, carried by four to six bearers on long poles). If it had not been for the Indian shacks in the background, the adjutant storks gloomily surveying the scene from the rooftops, and the numerous Indian servants and hawkers milling about, the stranger might have thought he had arrived in Jane Austen’s Bath. Indeed, Frederick Shore arriving in Calcutta in November 1818, aged nineteen, found the society very much like that of ‘a country Town in England’.

  Frederick Shore began his career as a civil servant by spending a year at Fort William College dutifully studying Persian and Hindustani and attending lectures on religion and good government. In a letter he wrote to his aunt back in England, he assured her that he did not ‘wish to have a name among the idle ones of this place of which there are a good many’. Calcutta boasted all the temptations of an English town. There were European shops selling ‘liquors of all kinds, guns, pistols, glass ware . . . crockery, stationery, shoes and boots, hosiery, grocery and an infinity of articles’ on which a young man could waste his money. There were taverns, some where he might respectably hold a dinner for his friends, and others where he was likely to fall prey to inebriety and the charms of ‘sable beauties’. There were pleasure gardens and assembly rooms where young men could dance and flirt pleasurably with young ladies who had come out, as Shore put it, ‘for the [marriage] market’. Shore avoided dancing – he did not wish to become ensnared in marriage before he could afford it. Nor did he indulge in gambling at cards or at the races, two of the pursuits most favoured by young recruits. He was aghast at the foolhardiness of those ‘mad’ young men who bought sixteen horses, bet on them crazily and ruined their prospects for ever.

  At all their settlements, even the remote military cantonments in the Indian countryside, the British created a simulacrum of British society. But their little Englands in India were always fragile, as India insinuated itself into every aspect of daily life. British racial and cultural arrogance meant that they set out to shape Indian society and culture to their own ends. However, they discovered, just as the Mughals had done before them, that India’s impact on the culture of its rulers was inescapable. At first the British were fairly unconcerned by this and to some extent they embraced India and allowed it to become an integral part of their identities. Indeed, East India Company officials referred to themselves as Indians, East Indians or Anglo-Indians. The latter name stuck and throughout this book Anglo-Indian is used to refer to the British in India. It was only in 1911 that the meaning of the term changed and it was used to describe the people of mixed British and Indian parentage, who until then were known as Eurasians.

  Besides enthusiastically adopting the Indian hookah, in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, company officials smoked the Indian form of cannabis known as bhang, drank arrack, interlarded their conversations with Indian words like ‘pukka’ (proper) and ‘bundobust’ (contract), took regular shower baths, adopted lightweight nankeen jackets and white linen waistcoats and sometimes even wore Indian-style loose pyjamas, which were more comfortable in the heat. Indeed, they allowed India to get under their skins and were transformed into hybrid figures, neither British nor Indian but a blend of the two.

  The scarcity of European women meant that many British men lived with Indian mistresses, in semi-Indian style. These unions were not heartless matters of convenience, many men were deeply attached to their consorts and whiled away their leisure hours in the purdah quarters of their compounds. Such intimate contact with Indian women educated the British in the ‘syntaxes of native life’ and the women taught their partners the local language and customs, and how to enjoy Indian food.3 The children of these unions also created an enduring bond between the company servants and India. The fact that their lifestyle lent British society in India a rakish, slightly dissolute air seems not to have perturbed the majority of company officials.

  In fact, in the early days of company rule in India the British administrators actively set about constructing themselves as a new Indian aristocracy. The British were conscious of the fact that although they had replaced the Mughals as the ruling elite, in the eyes of their Indian subjects they were still low-class traders. They therefore concentrated on projecting an image of themselves as an impressive ruling class. The Reverend James Cordiner, who visited India in the 1820s noted that ‘all classes of society here live sumptuously and many individuals expend from 2 to 10,000 pounds each annually, in maintaining their households’. In Britain this level of expenditure would have been beyond the means of any but the wealthiest levels of the upper classes. Even if the figure is an exaggeration, it was true that in India the sons of ordinary middle-class commercial families, and of the declining British gentry, were able to live like aristocrats. If James Munro Macnabb had remained in the Lowlands of Scotland, where he was born, he might have expected to earn between £500 and £1,000 a year as a minister or doctor. He would have been able to afford between four and six servants, and might have spent between £20 and £30 a month on his table.4 In Calcutta, where he was Acting Mint Master and Magistrate of the City, he lived in ‘an excellent three-storied house . . . attached to the Mint’, employed ten bearers to carry him about town in his palanquin (a coffin-like box in which the passenger reclined and which was carried on poles by four to six bearers) and two hurkarrahs to run in front carrying silver sticks, which were marks of status. He also owned a coach and employed a coachman, as well as six syces (grooms) to care for the horses. Dining and entertaining were central to maintaining his place in Calcutta society, and a high proportion of the forty-one servants he employed were associated with the table. Apart from a cook, a cook’s mate, and a masalchi (spice grinder and dish-washer), James Macnabb employed a khansaman and a second butler to wait at table, assisted by an aubdar and a khidmutgar (waiter). He spent 400 rupees, or approximately £55, a month on food bought at the bazaar, as well as bread, butter, wood for the kitchen fire and wine and beer. This was a princely sum which ensured that his table would always have been well supplied with ‘delicious salt humps, brisket and tongues . . . superb curry and mulligatawny soup’.5

  The burra khana (big dinner) was the focus of Anglo-Indian social life. It was on their dinner tables that the British in India most extravagantly displayed their wealth and status. Amazed commentators remarked that there was always so much food ‘that no part of the table-cloth remains uncovered’.6 ‘The receipt for an Indian dinner appears to be, to slaughter a bullock and a sheep, and place all the joints before the guest at once, with poultry &c. to match,’ wrote the ever-critical Emma Roberts. She was in India as the companion to her married sister, a position which she described as one of unmitigated ennui, which perhaps accounts for her persistently disgruntled tone.7

  East India Company merchants had brought the eating habits of the British squirarchy with them to India. In Britain, a gentleman might consume as much as seventy-four kilograms of meat a year (compared to the average amount of about forty), one or two reaching the incredible weight of forty stone. The diet of fashionable society was reflected in caricatures of the time which featured obese and gouty men.8 Tables piled high with huge meat pies, saddles of mutton and enormous hams were vivid demonstrations of the upper class’s ability to command vast quantities of a scarce resource. Anglo-Indians gained a reputation for consuming immense amounts of meat, in contrast to the vegetarian Indians, and even the meat-eating Mughal nobility. Once the British were established in India, they continued to replicate the consumption p
atterns of the wealthy at home and loaded their tables with ‘Turkies that you could not see over – round of Beef, boiled roast Beef, stewed Beef, loin of Veal for a side dish and roast big capons as large as Hen Turkies’. Large bowls of curry and rice were placed along the table, in between the turkeys and beef. This was just the first course. After the outsized joints had been cleared, a second course of beef steaks, pigeon pies, chicken drumsticks, more curry and rice, ‘quails and ortolans . . . piled up in hecatombs’, fruit and nuts, was placed on the table.9

  Moreover, East India Company officials sat down to a table thus burdened with food twice a day. Frederick Shore was disgusted. He described to his sister Anna the ‘absurd, universal practice in this country, viz. to eat a tiffin as it is called, though it is nothing more or less than a regular dinner, at 3 o’clock after which they sit down to another dinner in the evening though they cannot eat anything, yet there is always a tolerable portion of wine and beer drank, the doing of which twice daily cannot be very conducive to health’.10 An army captain confirmed Shore’s impression and noted that due to eating too much at tiffin most people ‘only go through the form of dining; . . . condescend[ing] to taste some Yorkshire ham, coast mutton . . . hot curry and English cheese’. It was impossible for the diners to consume all that was set before them. In Calcutta, poor Christians were given the leftovers, but elsewhere the food had to be thrown away. Only the lowest caste of Indians would consider eating unclean British leftovers and in the Indian climate it was difficult to keep the food for the next day. Thus, burra khanas engendered an extravagant level of waste.

  The servants were invariably blamed. The Reverend Cordiner complained that Indians ‘estimat[ed] the goodness of a dinner by the quantity which they crowd upon the board’. Emma Roberts acknowledged that ‘the servants would be ready to expire with shame at their master’s disgrace’ if the number of dishes were reduced, or smaller joints of meat were chosen, although she also blamed the Anglo-Indians’ lack of elegance and refinement for the vulgar splendour of the burra khana. Indian servants certainly collaborated with their masters’ and mistresses’ efforts to display their wealth on their tables. The status of their employers had a direct effect on the servants’ own standing in the Indian social world. During dinner parties the silent, and apparently subservient, servants of the guests were in fact quietly assessing the display of wealth on the table and ranking their colleagues accordingly. Elizabeth Gwillim, the wife of a judge at Madras, noted that her servants took ‘great pride in setting out the dinner’. Fortunately, Elizabeth’s ‘plate and figurines were just to their taste’. ‘I am glad I brought our China dessert set,’ she wrote, ‘both that and my Wedgwood have been admired beyond everything.’

  Elizabeth did discover that the servants’ pride in the dining arrangements could have certain drawbacks. For one particular occasion she was pleased to have obtained a hare and she carefully instructed her cook on how to prepare it. During the evening the hare failed to appear on the dining table and when she ordered her butler to fetch it he ignored her. Afterwards, when she asked for an explanation, ‘he said he was very sorry but the cook and he had both agreed that all the company would laugh if a country hare was brought to so handsome a dinner . . . I believe [they] are perfectly convinced that it is from stinginess that I order them and I have never so far prevailed as to have one for company’. Hares were cheaper than rabbits and therefore considered inferior. Elizabeth was sufficiently good-humoured to simply laugh at her servants’ ‘extraordinary notions of grandeur’.

  The Gwillims continually ran into the distinction their servants made between high- and low-status foodstuffs. They both particularly liked fish and Elizabeth would often take a trip down to the beach when the fishermen were bringing in their catch. Here she came across all sorts of fish she had never encountered before and she and her husband would try them for supper. But many of their favourite dishes, such as the tiny whitebait-like fish which the Indians fried whole, were never served at other British dining tables. Her servants explained: ‘Gentlemen cannot eat that fish.’ ‘Then we ask them if they can eat it, yes they say, black people very much like that but gentlemen can’t eat, no custom to bring gentlemen.’ Their servants served the British with the food of the previous ruling class: the Mughlai pilaus and ‘dum poked’ chickens that the company merchants had eaten at Surat. These were the high-status dishes familiar to the Muslim cooks the Anglo-Indians usually employed.11

  What the British in India ate, for breakfast, lunch and dinner, was curry and rice.12 Anglo-Indian dining tables were not complete without bowls of curry which, eaten like a hot pickle or a spicy ragout, added bite to the rather bland flavours of boiled and roasted meats. No Indian, however, would have referred to his or her food as a curry. The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names and their servants would have served the British with dishes which they called, for example, rogan josh, dopiaza or quarama. But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.

  The British learned this term from the Portuguese who described as ‘caril’ or ‘carree’ the ‘broths’ which the Indians ‘made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts . . . and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger . . . besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments [which they] . . . poured in good quantity upon . . . boyl’d Rice’.13 The Portuguese had adopted these terms from various words in south Indian languages. In Kannadan and Malayalam, the word karil was used to describe spices for seasoning as well as dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat. In Tamil, the word kari had a similar meaning (although nowadays it is used to mean sauce or gravy). As the words karil and kari were reconfigured into Portuguese and English they were transformed into ‘caril’ and ‘carree’ and eventually into the word curry which the British then used as a generic term for any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy in every part of India.14

  Although they used the word curry to describe dishes from every Indian region, the British were aware of regional differences in the cooking of the subcontinent. In his cookery book on Curries and How to Prepare Them (1903), Joseph Edmunds stated decisively that ‘in India there are at least three separate classes of curry, the Bengal, the Madras and the Bombay’. Most cookery books also incorporated two other types of curry from outside India’s borders and gave recipes for Ceylon and Melay (Malayan) curries. The Anglo-Indian understanding of regional differences was, however, rather blunt. They tended to home in on distinctive, but not necessarily ubiquitous, features of a region’s cookery and then steadfastly apply these characteristics to every curry which came under that heading. ‘The Bengal artist,’ wrote Edmunds, ‘is greatest in fish and vegetable curries. Bombay boasts of its peculiar gifts in its bomelon fish and its popedoms.’15 Ceylon curries were usually piquant with chillies and made with coconut milk.

  These broad categorisations missed out much of the subtle variety of dishes within each region and the strong sense among Indians of local, often minute, differences in food. Even within one region the variations in soil, water and air from one locality to another are thought to produce subtle distinctions in the taste of the grains, vegetables and grazing animals. Thus Punjabis ‘in a strange part of the Punjab [regard themselves] . . . as exiles, and comment on the air, water, milk, vegetables, the size and sweetness of cabbages and cauliflowers, dialect and everything else as not being quite what [they are] used to’.16 Tiny differences in the way basic foodstuffs are prepared, which may seem irrelevant to an outsider, are of great significance to Indians who pay close attention to the nuances of food. When south Kanarese villagers are asked how they differ from the people living in the neighbouring villages they will often respond by explaining ‘they eat . . . raw rice’ and ‘we eat parboiled rice’.17

  The British insensitivity to these details was matched by their hazy awareness of the endless variations in flavour which were achieved by adding
spices to the food in different combinations and at different stages in the cooking process. This was partly the result of the fact that Indian cooks gradually altered and simplified their recipes to suit British tastes. For example, Lucknavi quaramas were transformed into Anglo-Indian ‘quoremas’ or ‘kormas’, which were different in substance as well as name. A ‘thirty-five years’ resident’ of India who wrote an Indian cookery book explained that korma ‘without exception, is one of the richest of Hindoostanee curries, but it is quite unsuited to European taste, if made according to the original recipe’. He gave both the original and a diluted British version of the curry. The latter greatly reduced the amount of ghee and yogurt, as well as the aromatic spices such as the cloves and cardamom. It omitted the cream altogether and, instead, produced a more generic curry sauce by adding coriander, ginger and peppercorns which were basic ingredients in a British curry.

  The ‘original’ and the British recipe for Kurma or Quorema Curry

  from Thirty-Five Years’ Resident, The Indian Cookery Book

  The original recipe: –

  Take two pounds of mutton, one pound of tyre or dhye [yogurt], two chittacks of garlic, one dam of cardamoms, four chittacks of bruised almonds, four mashas of saffron, the juice of five lemons, one pound of ghee, four chittacks of sliced onions, one dam of cloves, one chittack of pepper, four chittacks of cream, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground garlic.