Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  The following is the recipe of the quorema curry usually put on a gentleman’s table: –

  Two chittacks and a half or five ounces of ghee, one cup or eight ounces of good thick tyre, one teaspoonful of ground chillies, four teaspoonsful of ground onions, one teaspoonful of coriander seed, six small sticks of ground cinnamon, two or three blades of lemon-grass, one teaspoonful and a half of salt, a half a teaspoonful of ground ginger, a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground garlic, eight or ten peppercorns, four or five ground cloves, five or six ground cardamoms, two or three bay leaves, a quarter of a cup of water, the juice of one lemon, and twelve large onions cut lengthways into fine slices.

  Take two pounds of good fat mutton, and cut it into pieces nearly one inch and a half square. Warm the ghee, fry in it the sliced onions, and set aside; then fry all the ground condiments including the ground hot spices. When quite brown, throw in the mutton and salt, and allow the whole to brown, after which add the tyre, the hot spices with peppercorns and bay leaves, the lemon-grass, the water, and the fried onions, finely chopped; close the pot and allow to simmer for about an hour and a half or two hours, by which time the kurma will be quite ready. The blades of lemon-grass are never dished up.18

  Curry became not just a term which the British used to describe an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts, but a dish in its own right, created for the British in India. One surgeon described curry as ‘a most heterogeneous compound of ginger, nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves, cardamoms, coriander, Cayenne pepper, onions, garlic, and turmeric, ground to a powder by a pestle and mortar, made into a paste by ghee, . . . and added to a stewed kid or fowl’.19 And this was the formula which provided a template for Anglo-Indian curries, most of which were variations on this basic recipe. The Madras curry epitomised this attitude towards Indian food. It was simply a spicy sauce for meat, made from a spoonful of curry powder, some onions and tomatoes. Joseph Edmunds described it as ‘the high old curry made perfect’.

  Recipe for Madras Karhi from W. H. Dawe’s

  The Wife’s Help to Indian Cookery

  Cut a part of a neck of mutton into small pieces, taking out the bones; fry in its own fat until brown. Let it stew for two hours in some water or good stock. Add some fried onion, pepper and salt to taste, season it, and a few minutes before serving put a tablespoonful of curry-powder on the meat, mixing well, letting it simmer for about five minutes.20

  Although it lacked sophistication, Anglo-Indian cookery was the first truly pan-Indian cuisine. Mughlai cuisine never became an all-India phenomenon: the culinary styles of many Indian regions were not incorporated into the repertoire and its spread was limited. In contrast, the British adopted recipes, ingredients, techniques and garnishes from all over the subcontinent and combined them in a coherent repertoire of dishes. Indeed, one of the distinguishing characteristics of Anglo-Indian cookery was its tendency to apply appealing aspects of particular regional dishes to all sorts of curry. In this way, mangoes, which were sometimes added to fish curries in parts of the southern coastal areas, found their way into Bengali prawn curries; coconut was added to Mughlai dishes, where it was an alien ingredient. In a similar fashion, Anglo-Indians applied the variety of relishes and garnishes which they discovered in India with indiscriminate enthusiasm to all their curries. Served alongside bowls of curry and rice would be little plates of the Persian garnish of chopped hard-boiled eggs, Punjabi lemon pickles, south Indian finely sliced raw onions, desiccated coconut, neat piles of poppadoms, as well as fried onions and shreds of crispy bacon.21 The Anglo-Indian passion for garnishes was also applied to the simple rice and lentil dish khichari, the ordinary food of the majority of the population, and a favourite dish with the Mughal emperors on their fast days. Khichari was frequently served for breakfast in Anglo-Indian households. It went well with fish, which was another breakfast item, as ‘in the hot season, fish caught early in the morning would be much deteriorated before the dinner hour’.22 The favoured garnishes were hard-boiled eggs and fried onions, and eventually all three (fish, eggs and onions) came to be seen as essential to a good kedgeree.

  Recipe for kedgeree from Edward Palmer’s Indian Cookery

  Cold cooked fish (flaky fish preferable)

  Cooked Patna rice

  Butter

  Chopped onions

  A finely sliced clove of garlic

  Ground turmeric

  Hard-boiled eggs

  Pepper

  Salt

  Green or red chillies

  Cook in sufficient butter for a few minutes (but do not brown) the onions and garlic. Then add a teaspoonful of ground turmeric, and cook this mixture for a few minutes longer.

  The rice and flaked fish is now added and the whole very lightly tossed together until warmed through. Pepper and salt to taste.

  Serve piled on a dish garnished with slices of hard-boiled eggs and green and red chillies cut lengthwise.23

  One of the most popular Anglo-Indian dishes is said to have been invented in Madras. The British are supposed to have asked their cooks to prepare soup as a starter, a concept unfamiliar to Indians who place all the dishes on the table at once and who pour liquid dishes over rice. The nearest thing to a soup that Madrassi cooks knew was a watery rasam (broth) made from black pepper or chillies, tamarind and water which in Tamil is called molo tunny, or pepper water. Ayurvedic physicians considered pepper water ‘one of the great blessings which God has bestowed upon the world’ and prescribed it for intermittent fever, haemorrhoids, dyspepsia and cholera. It is still served to people recovering from a stomach upset in south India today, and a rasam of this kind is often poured over rice as a digestive. The Madrassi cooks inventively added a little rice, a few vegetables, some meat, and transformed this broth into mulligatawny soup. Anglo-Indians in Madras were said to imbibe such large quantities of it that they were known as ‘Mulls’.24 Mulligatawny soup was one of the earliest dishes to emerge from the new hybrid cuisine which the British developed in India, combining British concepts of how food should be presented (as soups or stews, etc.) and Indian recipes. It quickly spread to the other British settlements dotted around the subcontinent and ‘very hot mulligatani soup’ was invariably served at every Anglo-Indian dinner party and ball.25

  Recipe for Chicken Mulligatawny Soup from Indian Cookery

  ‘Local’ for Young Housekeepers

  Cut a Chicken into 12 or 16 pieces, and boil it in two teacups of water. Take five or six corns of black pepper, ⅛ of an ounce each of turmeric, and fresh ginger, five or six slices of garlic and a dessert-spoon of raw coriander, with one red chilly, and grind them all together to make a fine paste. Mix the ground paste with the chicken broth and let it boil. After boiling, strain the gravy through a piece of muslin; warm a heaped tea-spoon of ghee in a stewpan, and fry a sliced onion, put in the meat and gravy together, stir and allow the curry to boil. Put no acid in the curry, serve it with a sour Lime cut in slices in a separate plate.

  Just as the British in Madras discovered molo tunny, the British in Bombay developed a liking for their region’s specialities. Bomelon were small fish which the residents of Bombay treated with asafoetida and then hung up to dry in the sun. Fried until they were golden brown and crumbled over food they imparted a strong salty taste which the British adored. They christened this seasoning Bombay duck as these fish were known to swim close to the surface of the water. As early as the seventeenth century, the British living at Bombay were known as ‘Ducks’ due to their fondness for this delicacy.26 The residents of the Bombay area also ate papads. These were thin fried discs of a paste made from ground and roasted lentils. They were used like bread as a side dish with the meal. The British called them poppadoms.

  In the seventh and eighth centuries, fire-worshipping Zoroastrians had fled the Arab invasion of Persia and settled along the west coast of India. The Parsees, as they were known, adapted to their new surroundings, adopting many Indian habits. When the Europeans began to arrive, they adapted again, learned E
nglish, moved into shipping and grew wealthy from the China trade. The East India Company merchants in Bombay mixed with the Parsees during the early days of the company, and later, once their rule was established, they often employed Parsee butlers in their households. By these means the Parsee dish of dhansak became well known to the British. This is a dhal of four pulses, which is made with either chicken or mutton and vegetables. It is thick and very spicy, and is best eaten, Parsee-fashion, with caramelised brown rice and fried onions.27 The use of tamarind and jaggery in the dish betrayed the influence of the Gujarati love of sweet and sour on Parsee cooking. Dhansak was one of the ‘curries’ which regularly appeared on Anglo-Indian dining tables and which eventually became a standard item on British Indian restaurant menus.

  Not only did the Anglo-Indians’ eclectic approach to Indian cookery create a repertoire of dishes which brought together in one kitchen influences ranging from all over the subcontinent, they also transported this cuisine around India. By the middle of the nineteenth century, British influence could be felt from the southern tip of Ceylon, to the North-West Frontier with Afghanistan, and the eastern Burmese jungles. Wherever they went the Anglo-Indians took curry.

  The British in India were constantly on the move. Every two or three years company officials (both civil and military) were posted to new stations, which necessitated packing up and transporting their entire households over vast distances. Emma Roberts thought ‘a more unfixed, unsettled, floating community cannot be imagined’.28 After Frederick Shore finished his year of studies at Fort William College in Calcutta, he moved at least seven times in the course of his nineteen years as a Bengal civil servant. His first posting was as assistant to the Board of Commissioners at Farrukhabad. He had two choices as to how to travel the five hundred miles from Calcutta to Farrukhabad. The first was to dawdle upriver in a large, cumbersome flat-bottomed boat known as a budgerow. By this means the journey would have taken about four months. The alternative was to travel by dak (post), along the route taken by the postal runners who carried the mail. The dak passenger was transported in a palanquin, carried by six or eight bearers who were changed every few miles, like horses for stagecoaches in Europe. This would have cut the journey by half, but it was by no means a comfortable means of transport, as one army officer warned:

  We cannot promise you much pleasure in the enjoyment of this celebrated Oriental luxury. Between your head and the glowing sun, there is scarcely half an inch of plank, covered with a thin mat, which ought to be, but never is watered. After a day or two you will hesitate which to hate the most, your bearers’ monotonous, melancholy, grunting, groaning chant, when fresh, or their jolting, jerking, shambling, staggering gait, when tired. In a perpetual state of low fever you cannot eat, drink or sleep; your mouth burns, your head throbs, your back aches, and your temper borders upon the ferocious.29

  It was necessary to make good arrangements for provisions on such a long journey. Early travellers in India had learned that it was best to travel well equipped, otherwise one could expect to live frugally. Given that the majority of the population was vegetarian, it was difficult to buy anything other than a few lentils, some rice and a little butter, and so the British took virtually everything they might need with them. In 1638, Albert de Mandelslo journeyed with some British merchants carrying supplies of silver and trade goods to the factories which dotted the route from Surat to Agra. On the way they shot wild ducks and met ‘with so many Deer and wild Boars, that it was no hard matter for us to get a good supper’. They even travelled with their own cooks to ensure the meat was prepared to their liking.30 Lord Auckland did the same when he travelled from Calcutta to Simla in 1837. He took his French chef St Cloup, who presided over a small army of cooks whipping up lavish breakfasts and good dinners for the Governor-General’s guests, including the Nawab of Oudh. His entourage was the size of a small city. A train of 850 camels, 140 elephants, 250 horses and 12,000 personnel stretched across the plain for ten miles, raising a cloud of dust which must have been visible for miles. This was travel in the style of the Mughal emperors whose effect as they passed over the country was that of a plague of locusts. Besides the damage done to the farmers’ fields, the Mughal camp would requisition all available food to supply the entourage and leave hunger and misery behind them. Lord Auckland’s servants were instructed to pay for any food supplied by the peasantry but this did not make the farmers any less reluctant to relinquish their stores, especially as much of the area they passed through was already suffering from famine.31

  Travellers who went by budgerow or dak caused less devastation. They would buy from the villagers ‘boiled and smoked milk in earthen pots, [and] very small eggs of doubtful age’, but otherwise budgerow travellers were served by a cook-boat which would draw alongside at mealtimes to serve the passengers hot rolls for breakfast and meat curries in the evenings.32 It was, however, always wise to keep some provisions on the main boat (as well as tea-making equipment) as the cook-boat was occasionally delayed and no dinner obtainable.33 Travelling by dak was done at night in order to avoid the heat of the sun and the day was spent in camp where the cook rustled up meals over a small portable stove. In the 1840s a network of dak bungalows was built which provided the traveller with food and a place to rest. These soon became notorious for their cookery. ‘The [dak] bungalow khansaman, knowing that he has no other condiment whatever to offer to the hungry traveller, will, when asked, unblushingly profess to provide every delicacy of the season; but when he appears and uncovers his dishes, there is fowl, nothing but fowl, of every age, size, and degree of toughness.’34 Chicken was the only meat which could easily be made available at a moment’s notice. Anglo-Indians often joked that as soon as he saw the dust of a traveller rising in the distance the bungalow cook would rush out to catch and kill one of the scrawny chickens scratching in the yard. The ubiquitous chicken was often presented to the traveller in the form of ‘country captain’, one of the best-known Anglo-Indian curries. There are many different versions of this dish but it was basically a curry of freshly killed chicken, flavoured with turmeric and chillies, both ingredients which kept well. Nobody knows how the curry acquired its name but some suggest that it was invented by the captain of a ‘country’ (i.e. Indian) boat. It was certainly frequently served to the British when they were ‘up-country’, travelling by budgerow or dak.35 It was accompanied by ‘country’ bread which most Anglo-Indians hated. But despite all the complaints ‘chuppaties made of coarse flour like oatmeal, and deliciously hot, were an excellent substitute [for European bread] . . . Fresh goat’s milk could also be had, and as travellers always carried their own tea, it was quite possible to get a hearty and satisfactory meal.’36

  Recipe for Country Captain from The Indian Cookery Book by

  A Thirty-Five Years’ Resident

  Cold meats and curries are sometimes converted into this dish, the condiments for which are as follows: – Two chittacks or four ounces of ghee, half a teaspoonful of ground chillies, one teaspoonful of salt, a quarter of a teaspoonful of ground turmeric, and twenty onions, cut up lengthways into fine slices.

  Cut up in the usual way an ordinary curry chicken. Warm the ghee and fry the sliced onions, which when brown set aside; fry the ground turmeric and chillies, then throw in the chicken and salt, and continue to fry, stirring the whole until the chicken is tender. Serve it up, strewing over it the fried onions.37

  Another set of curries belong under the heading of camp cookery. During the cold weather between October and May the civil servant travelled around his district ‘surveying the country, inspecting and forwarding the work of irrigation . . . settling with the zemindars for their taxes’ and administering justice. Life in camp was far more luxurious than dak or budgerow travel, and each campsite was transformed into a ‘large and handsome’ village of tents, all of which were fitted out with glass doors and a stove. Emma Roberts was impressed that ‘Indian servants [in camp] never permit their masters to regret the want of regul
ar kitchens’. They would produce ‘fish of every kind, fresh, dried, pickled or preserved, or hermetically sealed in a tin; delicate fricassées, rissoles, croquettes, omelettes, and curries of all descriptions; cold meats and game of all sorts, jellies, and jams from London and Lucknow, fruits and sweetmeats; with cakes in endless variety, splendidly set out in china, cut glass, and silver’.38 Often a party of men and women would accompany the civil servant, spending their days indulging in the favourite Anglo-Indian pastime of shikari (hunting). This gave rise to an entire branch of Anglo-Indian curries, including braised quail, wild duck and rabbit curry.39 To accompany these, the cooks made up fiery shikari sauces of salt or fermented fish, chillies, cayenne pepper, asafoetida, mushrooms and wine which Roberts thought ‘assuredly the most piquant adjuncts to flesh and fowl which the genius of a gastronome has ever compounded’.40

  Like the Mughals and the Portuguese before them, the British refashioned Indian food according to their tastes, and created an independent branch of Indian cookery. This Anglo-Indian cuisine was even the first truly pan-Indian cuisine, in that it absorbed techniques and ingredients from every Indian region and was eaten throughout the entire length and breadth of the subcontinent. But Anglo-Indian cookery can never be described as a truly national Indian cuisine, as the hybrid dishes which it produced were only consumed by the British in India. Unlike the Mughals and the Portuguese, the British failed to create a new branch of cookery which spread to the rest of the population.