Dhansak
This is the Parsee dish which the British liked best. The Parsees brought a fondness for mixtures of meat and vegetables or meat and fruit with them to the west coast of India, where they were influenced by the Gujarati love of sweet and sour and Indian spice mixtures. Traditionally, dhansak is made with four different sorts of lentils and eaten with caramelised brown rice and fried onions. Serves 6–8.
75g red split lentils (masoor dhal)
75g split mung beans (moong dhal)
75g skinned toor dhal
75g skinned split chickpeas (chana dhal)
2 large onions, finely sliced
½ teaspoon turmeric
500g vegetables of your choice, chopped into bite-size pieces, such as pumpkin, aubergine, potatoes, peppers, spinach
1cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped
2 whole garlic cloves
bunch of fresh coriander, chopped
4–6 tablespoons vegetable oil
2cm piece of fresh ginger, finely grated
6 cloves garlic, crushed
1 teaspoon cumin powder
1 teaspoon coriander powder
½ teaspoon chilli powder
2 brown cardamoms
1cm cinnamon stick
1 teaspoon black mustard seeds
½ teaspoon fenugreek seeds
3 tomatoes, chopped
2 green chillies, chopped
1kg chicken cut into pieces
300ml chicken stock
1–2 teaspoons jaggery or soft brown sugar
juice of 1 lemon or lime
Wash the lentils (dhals) and peas and soak in salted water over night.
Drain the lentils and peas and place in a large pan with 750ml water with the onions and the turmeric. Bring to the boil and simmer for about 20 minutes. Add the vegetables and the 1cm piece of ginger, 2 whole garlic cloves and most of the fresh coriander, and simmer until the lentils and peas are soft. Remove from the heat and leave to cool. Then mash or purée the mixture with a potato masher or in a food processor.
Heat 4–6 tablespoons of oil in a pan and add the grated ginger, crushed garlic and fry for 5 minutes. Add the cumin, coriander, chilli powder, cardamoms, cinnamon, mustard seeds and fenugreek seeds and continue frying. After a few seconds add the tomatoes and green chillies. Fry for another 2 minutes, stirring. Add the chicken and fry until all the pieces are browned.
Add the chicken and spice mix to the lentil mix and salt to taste. Add 300ml chicken stock, the jaggery and lemon or lime juice. Simmer and serve when the meat is thoroughly cooked. Garnish with chopped fresh green coriander.
The “Empress” Currie Powder is prepared from an old
Indian recipe with condiments of the finest quality
Sold in Bottles, 4d., 6d., 1/-, 1/6, and 2/- each.
Also in Tins, ¼ lb., ½ lb., 1 lb., 2 lb., 4 lb. & 7 lb.,
at 2/- per lb.
6
Curry Powder: bringing India to Britain
ON 27 MARCH 1811, an advert appeared in The Times which announced to the retired East India Company officials of London that they would now be able to enjoy ‘Indian dishes in the highest perfection’ at the newly opened Hindostanee Coffee House. At the corner of Charles Street and George Street, the coffee house was well placed, as this area, around Portman Square, had recently become fashionable among returned Anglo-Indians. The old India hands could sit in custom-made bamboo-cane chairs, surrounded by paintings of Indian scenes, and reminisce about their former lives while savouring curries ‘allowed by the greatest epicures to be unequalled to any . . . ever made in England’. In a separate smoking room, they could whiffle away at their hookahs. One notorious patron, Charles Stewart, who was rumoured to have had sixteen Indian wives and to have bathed in the Ganges every morning when in Calcutta, referred to the establishment as the ‘Hooka Club’. The Indian proprietor, Sake Dean Mahomed, assured his customers that the spices, oils and herbs, both for the curries and for the hookah tobacco, were all specially procured in India. This ensured an ‘authentic’ taste which allowed his customers to feel themselves transported back to their old haunts.1
Sake Dean Mahomed designed the first curry house in Britain to appeal to men like William Makepeace Thackeray, the first bearer of that name, who made a fortune in India as the collector of Syhlet district. In this wild and forested part of Bengal, he collected the East India Company’s revenue in the form of cowry shells for a salary of about £62 per annum. This was hardly a sum to make a man rich. However, elephants were plentiful in Syhlet and Thackeray rounded them up and sold them to the company at a rate which enabled him, after only ten years in India, to capture a pretty bride and retire aged a mere twenty-seven. On his return to Britain in 1776, he settled down to a peaceful life digging the garden of the small country estate at Hadley, in Middlesex, which he purchased with his riches.2
Retired East India Company officials were by now familiar figures on the London scene. They were known as nabobs, a British corruption of the word nawab, meaning a governor or ruler of a district. Like Thackeray, these men used their wealth to buy themselves country estates; often, they also bought seats in Parliament, thus purchasing themselves a place in the British social elite. The established aristocracy, feeling their position of power was threatened, attacked the nabobs as social upstarts, and accused them of corrupting honest hard-working Britain with oriental luxury. An alternative school portrayed them as bumbling but likeable figures of fun. Nabobs popped up, often as minor figures, in many of the plays, books and newspapers of the period. William Makepeace Thackeray’s grandson and namesake often included a nabob as one of the characters in his novels. Jos Sedley in Vanity Fair is the collector of Boggley Wollah. He suffers from a ‘liver complaint . . . superabundant fat . . . indolence and a love of good living’. A foolish, greedy figure, he is easily hoodwinked by the anti-heroine, Becky Sharp. In Thackeray’s The Newcomes, the ‘loose trousers, long mustachios and yellow face’ of the kindly Colonel Newcome of the Bengal Cavalry reveal that he is a nabob. The colonel loses his fortune in the Bundelcund Bank crash.
Dean Mahomed’s speculation in curries was as unsuccessful as Colonel Newcome’s venture into Indian banking. Less than two years after he opened the Hindostanee Coffee House, he was forced to petition for bankruptcy. Although the food and ambience were favourably reviewed in the Epicure’s Almanack, the Hindostanee was unable to compete with a number of other coffee houses which were better established and closer to the City of London. Norris Street Coffee House on the Haymarket had been serving curries since at least 1773 and the Jerusalem Coffee House in Cornhill was already established as the base for East India Company merchants and officials.3 Mahomed’s partner carried on the business, although it is unclear whether he maintained the Indian atmosphere. Mahomed, with more success this time, set up a vapour bath in Brighton where the Prince Regent enjoyed being ‘shampooed’. This involved vigorously massaging the skin with a loofah-like glove.
It is likely that many of the nabobs who settled around Portman Square had no need of Mahomed’s curries because they could afford to employ their own Indian cooks. Returning Anglo-Indians, unwilling to exchange the smooth subservience of their Indian servants for the truculence of British housemaids, routinely brought their ayahs (nannies), menservants and cooks back to Britain with them.
Ringa Swamee bitterly regretted hiring himself to a sahib in Benares, who had ‘brought me to England fifteen years ago and then died and left me helpless’. Ringa Swamee and his English wife and child had been reduced to begging. In The Asiatic in England Joseph Salter, a missionary who worked with stray Asiatics, described how the journey to Britain ended in disaster for many of these domestics. Newspapers were dotted with notices posted by Indian servants hoping to escape such a fate by finding work with a family returning to India.
Other notices asked for sightings of Indian absconders. Escaped domestics could disappear into the oriental underworld which the East India trade had created
in London. A network of grubby boarding houses existed in Whitechapel and in the ‘Oriental quarter’ around the high street in Shadwell. Here, lascars (Indian sailors) stayed while they waited for their ships to sail. Joseph Salter visited one such house in the 1850s, kept by ‘Abdool Rhemon, a native of Surat, near Bombay . . . [who] thrives at his countrymen’s expense’. Rhemon was said to have begun his career sweeping a crossing at St Paul’s Churchyard, but after the Nepalese ambassador took an interest in him he was able to set up his own business. ‘He kept two houses in this vicinity . . . the first floors being set apart as opium smoking-rooms. When Lascars were in the docks, these houses were invaded . . . We might go upstairs . . . and see them reclining on beds, smoking the insidious opium.’4 Many of the boarding-house keepers were ‘assisted by an English mistress, some of whom have lived so long in this element, that they use the Oriental vernacular [and] bear names . . . such as Mrs Mohammed . . . or Calcutta Louisa, and Lascar Sally.’ Many of the sailors jumped ship and made a living begging, thieving or working as street sweepers and hawkers of cheap goods. Salter came across one who made ends meet by selling ‘curry powder to gentlefolks in the suburbs’ and others must have found employment as cooks in the households of returning company merchants.5
If they were unable to afford the expense of bringing an Indian cook home with them, and could not find an Indian in Britain, old India hands employed women like Sarah Shade who had learned to make curries in India. Sarah had led an adventurous life as a soldier’s wife. In an account of her experiences, she claimed to have fought off a tiger by grasping the root of its tongue, and to have been laid out ready for burial perfectly sensible of what was happening to her, after a severe case of the flux had left her prostrate. Caught up in the Anglo-French wars in southern India, she was wounded in the face by shot and in the arm by a sabre, and then captured by the Sultan of Mysore’s army. Sarah’s knowledge of Indian cooking now came in useful as one of her captors was so impressed by her ability to speak his language and to prepare Indian food that he helped her, and her husband, to escape. Sarah undoubtedly picked up her culinary and linguistic skills among the Indian and Eurasian wives of the other soldiers. Many British soldiers married ‘pretty, half-caste girls’, and in 1813 one army officer estimated that ‘a third of the people in this country are either married to this race or have children grown up by Hindoostanee women’.6 Sarah Shade left her husband in India to return to Britain in the 1780s. Here, her knowledge of Indian cookery again helped her to survive as she kept herself out of the workhouse ‘by making curry for different East Indian families’.7
British households did not necessarily need an Indian cook for curries to be produced in their kitchens. Indian food found its way into British food culture by various channels. Family members at home were eager to learn about the exotic lives of sons and brothers in India and the young men often enclosed recipes in letters. Wilhelmina and Stephana Malcolm, stranded, unmarried, at the family home of Burnfoot, Dumfriesshire, kept up a regular correspondence with their ten brothers, some of whom were seeking their fortunes in India. The sisters copied their brothers’ instructions on how to make ‘mulgatawy’ soup and Indian pickle into their kitchen notebooks alongside more traditional recipes for Brown Windsor soup and potato puffs.8
Equally eclectic recipe collections were put together by the women who accompanied their husbands to India, garnered from their Indian cooks. When they retired, or returned to Britain on leave, Anglo-Indians instructed their British cooks in the art of preparing a good curry. In Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, Jos Sedley’s mother mentions that she has ordered the cook to make him a curry for dinner that night just as he likes it. Having set her sights on Jos as a possible marriage prospect, Becky Sharp decides to gain his favour by tasting the dish. She suffers ‘tortures with the cayenne pepper’ and Jos and his father mischievously add to her misfortune by offering her a chilli. Misled by the name which sounds like ‘something cool’ she eats it with relief, only to discover that it is even hotter. Forced to throw dignity to the wind, Becky calls for water, to peals of laughter from Mr Sedley and his son. Outside fiction, however, Anglo-Indians were often successful in introducing their relatives and friends at home to the delights of Indian food. Although Thackeray was born in India, he was sent home at the age of four, like most Anglo-Indian children, to receive a British education, thus leaving India before he could acquire a liking for its food. But he discovered a taste for curry at the dining tables of his various aunts and uncles who had lived there. Indeed, he was so enthusiastic that he is said to have written ‘A poem to curry’:
Three pounds of veal my darling girl prepares,
And chops it nicely into little squares;
Five onions next prures the little minx
(The biggest are the best, her Samiwel thinks),
And Epping butter nearly half a pound,
And stews them in a pan until they’re brown’d.
What’s next my dextrous little girl will do?
She pops the meat into the savoury stew,
With curry-powder table-spoonfuls three,
And milk a pint (the richest that may be),
And, when the dish has stewed for half an hour,
A lemon’s ready juice she’ll o’er it pour.
Then, bless her! Then she gives the luscious pot
A very gentle boil – and serves quite hot.
PS – Beef, mutton, rabbit, if you wish,
Lobsters, or prawns, or any kind fish,
Are fit to make a CURRY. ’Tis when done,
A dish for Emperors to feed upon.9
Specialist recipe books began to appear, catering to the returned Anglo-Indian’s desire to reproduce Indian food. In 1831, the Oriental Translation Committee published a pamphlet entitled ‘Indian Cookery’ for the benefit of ‘that . . . considerable number of individuals and families in this country [who] have, from a long residence in the East, acquired a strong predilection for Indian modes of life’.10 It contained instructions on how to prepare the standard fare of Anglo-India – pilau, korma, dopiaza, khichari, kebabs and mango preserve – although the recipes were much closer to the Indian originals than later British recipes.
Enthusiasm for curries was no doubt fuelled by the bland nature of British cookery. Becky Sharp’s response to the cayenne pepper and chilli in Vanity Fair reveals how unused to spicy foods the British were at this period. This seems strange, given that it was the hunger for pepper and spices which had taken the British to India in the first place. But spices had slowly fallen out of favour in the West. During the seventeenth century, Europeans were captivated by the grace and beauty of classical architecture and sculpture, and they developed a passion for the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. This led to an investigation of classical cookery. The Romans loved pepper, and did in fact enjoy spicy food, but what interested seventeenth- and eighteenth-century cooks was the salt/acid taste combination of classical cookery, based on olives, capers and anchovies. This style of cookery accorded well with new scientific theories of digestion which envisaged the process as one of fermentation rather than combustion. Foods which had previously been shunned, such as mushrooms, anchovies and oysters, were redefined as healthy because they fermented easily. Spices, which had been seen as useful fuel to stoke the fires of the stomach, were now less valued. In France and Italy, the almond-based, spicy and fragrant cookery of the High Middle Ages, which relished the combination of sweet and sour, was replaced by a nouvelle cuisine. This eliminated the sweet from savoury dishes and relied on sauces based on butter and oils, which were thought to help bind the salts and chemicals which were the end result of fermentation. As a consequence, European cuisines became much blander.11
Britain took its culinary lead from France, and spices such as nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon were banished to the realm of puddings and cakes. Boxes of cumin, coriander, cardamom and saffron, which had once been regarded as precious luxuries, grew dusty on the pantry shelves. Hot spicy
food was condemned as overly stimulating and likely to arouse dangerous passions and lusts.12 These prejudices were combined with a distrust of vegetables. Onions, garlic and leeks were regarded with suspicion because they tainted the breath and were thought to be difficult to digest. By the end of the eighteenth century, the range of ‘safe’ vegetables was limited to old potatoes, cauliflowers, broccoli, French beans and asparagus. Meat, roasted, boiled and baked in pies, was still the staple food among the middle classes. Under these conditions, French nouvelle cuisine suffered in the hands of British cooks. A Swiss pastor complained in 1782 that the normal fare in a coffee house was ‘a piece of half boiled or half roasted meat; and a few cabbage-leaves, boiled in plain water; on which they pour a sauce made of flour and butter, the usual method for dressing vegetables in England’.13 Curries must have made a very welcome change.
Although the demand for spices had lessened, the British remained greedy for oriental goods. In the seventeenth century, tea drinking was introduced into polite society from China and this stimulated the demand for elegant tea bowls and fine Chinese porcelain. A number of small shops specialising in oriental wares sprung up in London. At Peter Motteaux’s boutique in Leadenhall Street, the connoisseur of luxury goods could buy tall blue-and-white Chinese jars, rich brocades, and cabinets in burnished gold.14 Ladies’ fashions incorporated Eastern elements, and there was a craze for turbans, the soft pashmina shawls of Kashmir, and Indian muslins worked in silver and gold. Returning nabobs introduced Indian architecture into Britain. At Sezincote in the Cotswolds, Charles Cockerell built himself a house in the oriental style with domes and ornamental pillars. At each end of the house he constructed summerhouses with stars painted on the ceilings so that he could recapture the Indian experience of sleeping outside under the night sky. The Prince Regent followed suit with the Brighton Pavilion refashioned (1815–23) into an oriental fantasy of domes and pillars. Alongside this enthusiasm for exotic wares, interest grew in the cookery of the East. Ordinary British ladies and gentlemen with no connection to India began to look with curiosity upon these newfangled curries.
Curry Page 14
