By the 1840s a number of Indian products were for sale and their producers went to great lengths to persuade the British public that they should add curry to their diet. Edmund White, the maker of Selim’s Curry products, presented curry as a health food. In accordance with the methods of Victorian advertising, he wrote a pamphlet pompously entitled ‘Curries: their Healthful and Medicinal Qualities; their Importance in a Domestic, Commercial, and National Point of View’. In this, he argued that the consumption of fish curries made with Selim’s True Indian Curry Paste would aid digestion by stimulating the stomach, which would in turn stimulate the circulation of the blood, resulting in a more vigorous mind.15 He even claimed that curries could save lives and cited the preposterous case of a Mr Harper of the Jerusalem Coffee House (the well-known haunt of East India merchants) who, having tried all medicines without relief, had fallen into despair, only to be saved by the aromatics administered to him by Mr White in a curry paste.16
The Duke of Norfolk, perhaps irritated by these advertising strategies, suggested that if curry was so beneficial perhaps the Irish poor, then suffering under the effects of the potato famine, might use it to stave off their hunger pangs. This insensitive remark was deservedly lampooned in Punch, which claimed that he would soon be publishing a brochure entitled ‘How to live on a pinch of curry’, containing a recipe for ‘A capital soup’: ‘Take a saucepan, or, if you have not one, borrow one. Throw in about a gallon of good water, and let it warm over a fire till it boils. Now be ready with your curry, which you may keep in a snuff box if you like, and take a pinch of it. Pop the pinch of curry into the hot water, and serve it out, before going to bed, to your hungry children.’17
Among the general populace there were stalwart believers in the health-giving properties of curries. One of the readers of Queen magazine reported in 1863 that her ‘Great Aunt always had a great idea of the advantage of adding a curry to her bill of fare in hot weather. It is good for the digestion, she would say, and that is why hot things are so relished in India. Excessive heat interferes with the vital functions, and the digestive powers require a stimulant when enervated by the heat. She was very proud of her home-made curry powder, the receipt for which had been given to her by some of her Eastern friends in her younger days.’18
The first British cookbook to include Indian recipes was Hannah Glasse’s The Art of Cookery published in 1747. In it she gave three different recipes for pilau. Later editions included recipes for fowl or rabbit curry and Indian pickle. An adventurous cook, Glasse also included recipes for potatoes and instructions on how ‘to dress Haddocks the Spanish Way’ which included tomatoes.19 Although these New World vegetables had been known to the British since Columbus’s voyages to America, they were still confined to the experimental kitchens of the wealthy, whose servants Glasse’s manual was designed to instruct.
Curries initially suffered from the fact that they were viewed as a form of stew which was regarded as a lower-class way of preparing meat.20 It was not until the middle classes developed into a powerful social and economic force during the first half of the nineteenth century that curry really entered British kitchens.
The domestic ideology of the middle classes, which celebrated the virtuous housewife, transformed thrift into a mark of respectability. Cookery books and household manuals praised the middle-class woman who ran an efficient and economic household and who was able to stretch the food budget. Curries came into favour as an excellent way of using up cold meat. The British in India sometimes curried cold meat, and this is the origin of the jalfrezi which appears in Anglo-Indian cookery books as cold meat fried with lots of onions and some chillies.21 In Mrs Beeton’s definitive middle-class recipe book, all the beef and chicken curries were labelled as suitable for ‘cold meat cookery’. The irony of this state of affairs was unappreciated by most British consumers of curries who were unaware that the consumption of leftovers was taboo among the majority of Hindus.
Whether it was for its taste, its practicality or its nutritional values, curry was firmly established as part of the British culinary landscape by the 1850s. The author of Modern Domestic Cookery (1852) commented that while curry was ‘formerly a dish almost exclusively for the tables of those who had made long residence in India, [it] is now so completely naturalised, that few dinners are thought complete unless one is on the table’.22 If the recipe books are to be believed, there was virtually nothing that the British would not stew in curry sauce, from ordinary cuts of meat to calf’s feet, ox palates, sheep’s heads, lobsters and periwinkles. The middle classes were beginning to abandon the excess of the eighteenth century, when all the dishes were placed on the table at the same time in a display of profusion. Following the new French fashion, polite society dined à la Russe. This meant that the dishes and joints were placed on the sideboard and handed round, one by one, by the servants. The meal was divided into a number of courses, and a standard pattern of soup, fish, entrée, roast, followed by dessert, and sometimes a savoury, was established. The emphasis shifted from the quantity of the food to its refinement. To the discerning consumer, the light and often fanciful entrées were the most important dishes. Curries provided the chef with another opportunity to display his finesse in ‘made’ dishes, as opposed to simple joints of meat. The curry even shook off its reputation as a way of using up leftovers and began to appear at dinner parties. In the 1850s, a range of suggested menus for dinners of various sizes were published in a book entitled What Shall We Have for Dinner?. The author was given as Lady Maria Clutterbuck but the real writer is believed to have been Charles Dickens’s wife, Catherine, and Dickens himself may even have had a hand in the publication. Curried lobster, curried oysters and mutton curry rice were all included in the menus alongside roast goose, stewed eels with oyster sauce and cold pigeon pie.23
As the taste for curry spread to more and more people in Britain, it became a subject of discussion in the letter sections of women’s periodicals. ‘Madame,’ wrote W.M.B. from Bath in the ladies’ magazine Queen, ‘you supply me at times with such excellent recipes, I should be glad if you could favour me with a good one for dressing meats with Indian curry powder.’ Other readers sent in their favourite curry recipes and there were lengthy discussions about how the rice should be served (separately or with the curry sauce poured over it), which implements it should be eaten with (spoons were favoured) and whether Patna was more suitable than Carolina rice. The correspondents frequently proudly emphasised the ‘authenticity’ of their recipes, claiming they had been passed on to them by native cooks. One reader even claimed to have learned the secret for preparing ‘Genuine Madras Curry Powder’ from the butler to one of the sons of the infamous Tipoo Sahib.24 Even Richard Terry, chef de cuisine at the Oriental Club, felt the need to emphasise that the recipes in his Indian Cookery were ‘gathered, not only from my own knowledge of Cookery, but from Native Cooks’.
Despite these protestations, Rakhal Haldar, professor of Sanskrit at University College London in the 1840s and 50s, found the curries his British hosts kindly ordered ‘in consideration of my being an Indian . . . as different from the genuine Indian curry as two things can possibly be’.25 And of course, the curries and pilaus produced in nineteenth-century British kitchens were even more Anglicised than those which were prepared in India for Anglo-Indian consumption.
British curries in India used a basic formula: first spices, onions and garlic were ground and bound together by ghee, then this paste was added to some meat, and simmered. As Thackeray’s poem to curry illustrates, in Britain a similar recipe was followed. Onions and meat were first fried in butter, then curry powder was added, followed by stock or milk, and the mixture was left to simmer. Just before serving, a dash of lemon juice was added. The curries to be found in British recipe books are all variations on this template. The same recipe could be transformed into ‘Bengal Chicken Curry’ by adding to the sauce a spoonful of Bengal chutney, pickled limes and mangoes, or into ‘Melay Curry’ by adding hal
f a grated coconut.26 What distinguished curries in Britain from their Anglo-Indian counterparts was their reliance on curry powder, something which no self-respecting Indian cook would have allowed in the kitchen. Indian kitchens were not properly equipped without a heavy flat grindstone on which the spices were laboriously crushed by a rolling-pin-shaped stone. The day’s supply of spices was freshly ground each morning, and in wealthy households a special assistant, the masalchi, was employed to grind the spices.27 The stones were also used to crush onions, garlic, chillies and fresh herbs such as coriander, to produce cooking pastes and chutneys. Freshly ground spices impart a flavour incomparable to that given to food by pre-ground spices which have been kept in a store cupboard.
Recipe for Bengal chicken curry from Richard Terry’s
Indian Cookery
Cut into small dice 2 onions, and fry with 2 pats of butter: add your chicken cut into small joints, with one tablespoonfull of curry paste, ½ of powder, ½ of Bengal chutnee, ½ pickled lime, and ½ pickled mango: stir the whole over a slow fire 10 minutes, cover the chicken with broth or water, and let simmer 1½ hours – by this time the curry will be almost dry – add 1 teaspoonful of cream, and serve with rice, separate.28
Even when they were cooking for their British masters, Indian cooks would have maintained the principle of adding freshly ground spices at different stages of the cooking process. When Anglo-Indians initially began to collect Indian recipes to bring home with them, they too followed this principle. In eighteenth-century Britain the nabobs purchased their coriander and cumin seeds, their cardamom pods and cinnamon sticks separately from their local chemist. When curry first appeared in a British cookery book, no mention was made of curry powder. Hannah Glasse in 1747 instructed her readers to ‘Brown some Coriander Seeds over the Fire in a clean Shovel’ before beating them to a powder, much as an Indian masalchi would have done.29 The Oriental Translation Committee’s ‘Indian Cookery’ of 1831 listed the specific spices for each recipe and followed the principle of adding them at separate stages in the cooking process.
But as the Anglo-Indians began to think of curries as variations on one theme, they began to collect recipes for spice mixtures which they simply labelled ‘Curry Powder’. By the 1850s British cookery books called for a spoonful of curry powder in most of their Indian dishes. Sometimes they supplied recipes for curry powders which the cook could make up in advance, but as the popularity of curries became widespread it became easy to buy curry mixes. As early as 1784, Sorlie’s Perfumery Warehouse in Picadilly advertised that it was now selling ready-mixed curry powder.30 Between 1820 and 1840 imports of turmeric, the main ingredient in British curry powder, increased threefold from, 8,678 lb to 26,468 lb.31 Nevertheless, the British preferred Indian-made products and a correspondent to one ladies’ periodical complained that no British-manufactured curry powders or pickles (including Crosse & Blackwell’s) could equal those of Manoekjee Poojajee’s of Bombay.32 In the 1860s, Payne’s Oriental Warehouse in Regent and Mortimer Streets proudly advertised that all its curry powders and pastes, chutneys, pickled mangoes, tamarind fish, essences of chillies and preserved ginger were made at the Belatee Bungalow in Calcutta. The Leicester Square Oriental Depot advertised that it was prepared to send goods out to country residences for those enjoying time away from London on their country estates. By the end of the century, even non-specialist grocers normally stocked three types of curry powder: a yellow, a brown and a fiery, chilli-flavoured red one.33 The condiments necessary to make curry were easy to procure but the delicate nuances of Indian cookery were lost.
Mr Arnott’s Currie Powder from Eliza Acton’s Modern Cookery
turmeric 8 oz
coriander seed 4
oz cummin seed 2 oz
foenugreek seed 2 oz
cayenne ½ oz
We recommend Mssrs Corbyn and Co., 300 High Holborn for the spices
Over-reliance on curry powder meant that British curries had a tendency to degenerate into a kind of ‘hash’.34 In 1845, Edmund White derided British curries as ‘nothing more nor less than a bad stew, rendered the more abominably noxious from the quantity of yellowish green fat which must inevitably float in the dish. It would be ridiculous to call such dishes . . . True Indian Curries, or to talk about their healthful properties . . . they can only be referred to as a sample of the kind of dishes generally in use in England.’35
Pre-prepared spice mixes, known as masalas in India, are used occasionally on the subcontinent but they are usually added to the dish at the end of the cooking process. In Kashmir the women still make ver, a mixture of mustard oil, garlic and chillies ground together with a combination of spices which is made into a paste and shaped into doughnut-shaped discs. These are left to dry in the shade and then threaded on to strings and hung from the ceiling in the kitchen. A little ver is crumbled over dishes as they are placed on the table to impart a hot zing to the food. In Gujarat travellers carry balls of pounded garlic, red chillies and salt bound together with oil which they sprinkle over meals made over the campfire.36 There are good reasons why Indians rarely use pre-prepared masalas as the main flavouring for their dishes. Spices take different lengths of time to release their flavour. Thus it is better to add slow-releasing coriander to the cooking oil before adding turmeric, which is quick to impart its flavour, or cumin, which is apt to burn. Spices thrown into hot oil simultaneously tend to cook unevenly and the cook runs the risk of flavouring the dish with a slightly burnt or a slightly raw taste. The Christian communities of Bombay and Bassein get around this problem when they make curry powder by roasting each spice for the necessary amount of time before grinding it and mixing it with all the others. Their spice mixture is known as ‘bottled masala’, as they store it in long green bottles.37
Another typically British habit was to add the curry powder at the same time as the stock or water. In fact, spices release their taste more effectively when they are first fried in hot oil. For this reason, cooking pots in India are often rounded in order to allow the oil to collect at the bottom so that the spices can be fried first without using excessive quantities of fat.38 The flavour of a spice is also determined by the way in which it is treated before it is added to the dish. For example, roasted and crushed cumin tastes nutty, but fried whole in hot oil it imparts a gentler liquorice flavour.39 Spices added to a wet sauce give a different, less aromatic flavour to the dish than when the spices are fried.
Thirdly, British cooks routinely thickened curries by making a roux of curry powder mixed with flour, a technique which was used to thicken stews and casseroles. Wheat flour is never used in this way in Indian dishes, which are given body with ground almonds, coconut cream or a paste of onions.
One of the more authoritative British cookery writers, Eliza Acton, lamented ‘the great superiority of the oriental curries over those generally prepared in England’ which she attributed to ‘many of the ingredients which in a fresh and green state add so much to their excellence, being here beyond our reach’. She was also aware that Indian cooks varied their ‘dishes . . . with infinite ingenuity, blending in them very agreeably many condiments of different flavour, till the highest degree of piquancy and savour is produced . . . With us, turmeric and cayenne pepper prevail in them far too powerfully.’ But within the limitations of curry powder and British currying techniques, Acton recommended a number of measures which would save British curries from turning into spice-flavoured casseroles. ‘A couple of ounces of sweet sound cocoa-nut lightly grated . . . in the gravy of a currie is . . . a great improvement to its flavour,’ she pronounced. This was an attempt to reproduce the flavour of coconut milk frequently used in south Indian dishes. Acton also pointed out that ‘tamarinds imported in the shell – not preserved’ were available as a way of giving British curries an authentic taste. Most British cooks, however, had to rely on lemon juice (and sometimes sour gooseberries) as a substitute for unobtainable tamarinds. Lemon juice, added at the end of the cooking process, became a stand
ard ingredient in British curry. Apples were often used to replace mangoes, cucumbers or marrows to replace bitter gourds, which were essential ingredients in Bengali cuisine. Sultanas, that were sometimes added to Mughlai pilaus, also found their way into curries. They added a touch of the exotic and perhaps it was thought that they complemented the apples. After time, these ingredients were no longer viewed as substitutes for more authentic ingredients but instead as essential components of a good curry. When Leon Petit ran the restaurant in Spence’s Hotel in Calcutta in the 1950s he was ‘met with polite smiles of disbelief when [he] tried to explain to Indian cooks that apples [and sultanas] are essential to Western curries’.40
Recipe for Curried Veal from Joseph Edmunds, Curries and How
to Prepare Them
The remains of cold roast veal, 4 onions, 2 apples (sliced), 2 tablespoonsful of ‘Empress’ curry powder, 1 dessertspoonful of flour, ½ pint of broth or water, 1 tablespoonful of lemon juice.
Slice the onions and apples, and fry them in a little butter; then take them out, cut the meat into neat slices, and fry these to a pale brown. Add the curry powder and flour, put in the onions, apples, add a little broth or water, and stew gently till quite tender; add the lemon juice and serve with an edging of boiled rice. The curry may be ornamented with pickles, capsicums, and gherkins arranged prettily on top.41
On arrival in Bombay in 1858 as the bride of a British army officer, Matty Robinson discovered that Anglo-Indian curries were quite unlike the British ones she was used to: ‘I can’t touch the Indian fruits or the fish which they say is so delicious, and as to the curries it makes me sick to think of them; give me an English one!’ she wrote.42 When Eliza Acton included Mr Arnott’s authentically Anglo-Indian curry in her Modern Cookery, she warned that it ‘will be found somewhat too acid for English taste in general, and the proportion of onion and garlic by one half too much for any but well-seasoned Anglo-Indian palates’.43 The Anglo-Indians also liked their curries extremely hot. Curry-powder vendors spent a great deal of energy trying to persuade their British customers that it was not necessary to ‘experience the discomfort occasioned by excessive heat in order to enjoy the full delicacy of Eastern condiments’.44
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