Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  Once curries were firmly established in Victorian food culture, distinctively European herbs such as thyme and marjoram began to find their way into Indian recipes. Anglo-Indian dishes such as mulligatawny soup and kedgeree underwent further Anglicisation in the hands of British cooks. Richard Terry of the Oriental Club not only added the by now standard apples to his mulligatawny but also bay leaves, ham and turnips. Mrs Beeton included bacon in hers, while Eliza Acton strove for authenticity with ‘part of a pickled mango’ and grated coconut, but gave herself away by also suggesting the addition of the ‘pre-cooked flesh of part of a calf’s head’ and offal, as well as ‘a large cupful of thick cream’.45 Meanwhile, the transformation of the ever-versatile khichari continued. The Anglo-Indians had already added fried onions, fish and hard-boiled eggs to the rice and lentil dish. Now the aristocracy, who served kedgeree for breakfast during their country-house weekends, settled on smoked haddock as the definitive fish to add to the rice, and almost invariably abandoned the lentils.

  Recipe for an Anglicised Mulligatawny Soup from Richard Terry’s

  Indian Cookery

  Stock for the soup:

  Cut into small pieces 1 fowl and 7 lbs of lean veal; place it in a stewpan with 1 oz. of lean ham, 2 carrots, 2 turnips, 4 cloves, 2 allspice, 1 blade of mace, and a small bunch of mixed herbs. Add one pint of water; place the stewpan over the fire, and let all the water reduce, then fill the stewpan up with water, and then let boil gently for four hours, then strain it off into a pan. Have ready another stewpan and add 1 small carrot, 2 onions, 4 apples sliced, ½ a turnip sliced, 2 ozs of lean ham, 1 bay leaf, 1 celery, 2 sprigs thyme, 3 cloves, 1 blade of mace, 4 ozs of butter; stir the whole over a slow fire for ten minutes; add 5 tablespoonful of curry powder and 1 of paste; stir again over the fire for 2 minutes; add 4 tablespoonful of potato flour, 2 of Arrowroot and ¾ lb of flour; stir all well together, then add the stock, and stir over the fire till boiling; add a small piece of garlic, the size of a pea, let all boil for 2 hours; if this should be too thick, add more stock; any kind will do. The soup should then be rubbed through a tammy and placed again in a stewpan; add a little more stock and stir till boiling, let boil gently at the corner of the stove fire for 1 hour, keeping well skimmed; season with a tablespoonful of salt and of ½ of sugar; if this soup should be too hot in flavour, add more potato flour; when finished this soup should not be too thick, and serve with small pieces of chicken in the soup, and rice in a separate dish.

  The British also took their curries to their other colonies. Australia’s climate appealed to retiring Anglo-Indians who took their Indian eating habits with them. British companies exported curry powders and pastes to Antipodean cities, and the earliest cookery book published in Australia in 1864 ‘had a short essay on curry stuffs and the value of mixing one’s own’. It included recipes for the standard curries of Anglo-India – Madras, Bengal and Bombay – and suggested the typically British trick of substituting apples for mangoes. It also used the British technique of thickening the sauce by mixing the curry powder with flour. Australians made their own contribution to the development of curry, by adding wattlebird and kangaroo tail to the long list of meats which received the British curry treatment.46

  European travellers to seventeenth-century India discovered that with their meals the Indians ate a wide range of achars, or pickles and chutneys. Many of these were freshly made each morning. While preparing the spices for the main dish, the masalchi might grind together fresh green coriander leaves, coconut and green chillies to create a sharp, tangy, bright green paste, delicious with the soft and spongy south Indian rice breads known as idlis. Other pickles and chutneys were more like preserves and the Europeans found them very useful when they travelled across the vast subcontinent. Pietro della Valle, who had so much trouble finding anything to eat while travelling in India, equipped himself for his journey with ‘many Vessels of conserves of the Pulp of young Indian Cane, or Bambu (which is very good to eat after this manner) and of green Pepper, Cucumbers and other Fruits wont to be pickled by them’.47 European sailors used to buy up jars of achar to take with them on their sea voyages and these must have greatly improved their diet of dry, and usually wormy, biscuits and hard salt meat.48

  When jars of these pickles and chutneys arrived back in Britain with East India Company merchants and sailors, British cooks eagerly tried to reproduce them, just as they had done with curry, with the result that they underwent a similar process of metamorphosis. Indians very rarely used vinegar, and their pickles were made by layering vegetables or fruits in jars with oil or water. The mixture was flavoured with salt and spices and the jars were set in the hot sun where they were left to ferment. Lacking the intense heat of the Indian sun, British cooks resorted to vinegar to carry out the pickling process. Unable to lay their hands on mangoes or bamboo shoots, they tried out various substitutes such as marrows, apples or tomatoes for mangoes, and elder shoots for bamboo. Sultanas, persistently associated in the British mind with anything spicy, were also added. To reproduce the piquant heat provided by chillies, they added European flavourings such as horseradish and mustard powder.49 The bright yellow mixture of cauliflower, onions and mustard, known as piccalilli, almost certainly evolved out of these recipes. While curries made few inroads into British working-class households, jars of pickle became standard in all British pantries, and in the 1920s and 30s, housewives would prepare tomato or marrow chutneys for Christmas as a way of livening up the cold remains of the turkey.

  To make Indian pickle, from Hannah Glasse’s The Art of

  Cookery Made Plain and Easy

  To a gallon of vinegar one pound of garlick, and three quarters of a pound of long pepper, a pint of mustard seed, one pound of ginger, and two ounces of turmeric; the garlick must be laid in salt three days, then wip’d clean and dry’d in the sun; the long pepper broke, and the mustard seed bruised; mix all together in the vinegar, then take two large hard cabbages, and two cauliflowers, cut them in quarters, and salt them well; let them lie three days, and then dry them well in the sun.

  N.B. The ginger must lie twenty-four hours in salt and water, then cut small and laid in salt three days.50

  In China, East India Company merchants discovered soy sauce, and a number of soy-based condiments known as catsups. They took these dipping sauces back to India with them and John Ovington, who ate pilau and ‘dum poked’ chicken with the English East India Company merchants at Surat in 1689, noticed on the factory dining table ‘Bamboe and Mangoe Achar, and Souy, the choicest of Sawces, are always ready to whet the Appetite’. These sauces had the virtue of keeping for an extraordinarily long time and sailors stocked up with barrels of soy sauce and catsup for the long sea voyages. Recipes for these useful seasonings began to circulate in Britain. Hannah Glasse gave a recipe directed to the ‘Captains of Ships’ for a ‘Catchup to keep twenty Years’. It combined stale beer, anchovies, mace, cloves, pepper, ginger and mushrooms. She pointed out helpfully that ‘You may carry it to the Indies; a Spoonful of this to a Pound of fresh Butter melted, makes fine Fish-Sauce. Or in the room of Gravy-Sauce.’51

  The commonest catsup was made from mushrooms until tomatoes became popular in the nineteenth century. Tomatoes had been cultivated in Britain since the sixteenth century but many people thought them poisonous as they belonged to the Solanaceae family of plants which includes poisonous nightshades such as belladonna. It was known, however, that the Italians ate them with olive oil and by the eighteenth century the British had plucked up sufficient courage to include them in their diet. Philip Miller, superintendent of the Chelsea Physic Garden, noted in 1752 that tomatoes were ‘much used in England for soups’. It is possible that tomatoes were introduced into the British diet by Jewish families from Spain and Portugal who had strong trading links with the Caribbean and Americas where tomatoes were routinely eaten. By the nineteenth century, British cooks had discovered how useful they were as a souring and thickening agent, in soups and broths, and they also
adopted them as a base for catsups.52 Today the oriental origins of tomato ketchup, surely one of the most widespread relishes in the world, are forgotten.

  In India, catsups were the inspiration for the piquant shikari sauces which the Anglo-Indians enjoyed with their game and it was one of these sauces which eventually became one of the best-known British flavourings. Sometime in the 1830s, Lord Marcus Sandys, the former Governor of Bengal, drove into Worcester from his nearby country estate to visit Lea & Perrins, his local chemist-cum-grocer. The shop on Broad Street sold foodstuffs, cosmetics and all sorts of medicines and was known for its supply of spices and dried fruits specially imported from Asia and the Americas. Lord Sandys arrived with a recipe on a scrap of paper and requested Lea & Perrins to make up his favourite Indian sauce. The mixture which Messrs Lea & Perrins duly concocted was so fiery that it made their eyes water. But as has already been mentioned, according to Emma Roberts these sauces were ‘assuredly the most piquant adjuncts to flesh and fowl which the genius of a gastronome has ever compounded’. Sandys was delighted with the results. But the chemists were disgusted with the mixture. They put the extra barrels which they had made up for themselves in the cellar, where they were forgotten. During a spring clean, however, it was noticed that an appetising aroma was rising out of the abandoned barrels and on tasting the contents Lea and Perrins discovered that the concoction had matured into a pleasing spicy sauce. The enterprising pair went into immediate production. By 1845 they had set up a factory in Worcester, and by 1855 were selling over 30,000 bottles a year. Worcestershire sauce was even exported back to India.53

  In 1858, the East India Company was abolished and India was brought under the administration of the Crown. The previous year Indian troops had rebelled against their British officers and sparked a popular uprising against the British in parts of northern India. In the light of the Indian mutiny it seemed inappropriate for a vital part of the British Empire to be controlled by a trading company. In 1877, Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India, as part of Prime Minister Disraeli’s project to revive the popularity of the monarchy. Empire and monarchy, bound together, were symbols in a political and social strategy which encouraged patriotism in the working classes. Music-hall songs, popular plays, children’s adventure stories, all celebrating Britain’s empire, distracted the working man from the inequalities in British society by encouraging him to identify with a larger imperial project. The enthusiasm for empire which developed in Britain during the last quarter of the nineteenth century was expressed in the exotic names given to an array of commercial sauces and relishes, such as Nabob’s, Mandarin, or Empress of India.54

  Public interest in the empire was encouraged by a series of exhibitions which began with the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the specially constructed Crystal Palace. This combined the atmosphere of a funfair with educational displays of art, science, natural history and industry.55 After the stunning success of the Great Exhibition many others followed in London and Paris, and in the provincial towns of Britain. They marked a change in the British attitude towards empire, from a source of magical luxuries – spices, pashmina shawls, porcelain jars – to a more industrial and blatantly commercial interest. The galleries of the exhibitions demonstrated the usefulness of the colonies to Britain’s Industrial Revolution by displaying the various goods imported from the empire. The bales of hemp and jute and the sacks of tea contrasted with the cotton piece goods which Britain, in a reversal of fortunes, was now exporting to places like India. This impressed upon the spectator the importance of the empire as an export market for Britain’s industries.

  Even the Queen caught empire fever. She was particularly fascinated by India. In Osborne House, which she and Albert built on the Isle of Wight, she collected Indian furnishings, paintings and objects in a specially designed wing. This included a durbar room with white and gold plasterwork in the shapes of flowers and peacocks. Here the Queen, bedecked in jewels and looking like a parody of a maharani, would entertain guests. Indian curries were prepared in the royal kitchens and Victoria employed Indian servants in gorgeous costumes to stand at her dining table. She was particularly fond of these servants, who attended to her every need with quiet efficiency, gliding in and out of rooms to assist the ageing and rather overweight Queen to stand up and walk about. One of these Indians, a handsome twenty-four-year-old named Abdul Karim, gained a sinister level of influence over her. Known as the Munshi, the Indian title for clerk, he appointed himself to the position of personal secretary. He taught her to write and speak a little Hindustani and, unlike the other servants who communicated with the Queen in writing, he had personal access to her.56 The resentment of her other servants and the concerns of government officials eventually reached such a pitch that the Queen was persuaded to demote her favourite Indian, but she never lost her powerful, if somewhat hazy, sense of affection for her Indian subjects in her distant empire.

  If India featured prominently in the Queen’s imagination, its place in the popular fantasy world was assured by the Empire of India Exhibition held at Earls Court in 1895 and 1896. As a commercial enterprise, its main purpose was entertainment rather than education. One of the main attractions was a replica of an Indian town. Wooden buildings, which had once stood in the town of Pune, were reconstructed to recreate what one of the organisers claimed was ‘a really typical and realistic Indian village’. Nevertheless, a slight air of unreality must have been added by the mock-Indian jungle at its centre, decorated with life-size model tigers, crocodiles, snakes and elephants. The narrow streets were lined with shops populated by ‘eighty-five Indian craftsmen, including silk and carpet weavers’ who were brought over from India. In addition, over one hundred jugglers and dancers performed in the streets and animal keepers wandered about, leading behind them specially imported camels, elephants and cattle.57 Outside the Indian city, the visitor could sample a Mughal ornamental garden filled with Indian flowers and trees, while snake charmers, fakirs and lion tamers provided entertainment.

  The snake charmers’ cobras kept on dying, and Indian sailors had to be bribed to smuggle replacement snakes on to their boats. Large quantities of ghee were also imported, to feed all the Indian craftsmen and entertainers working at the exhibition. Unfortunately, the Indians did not take to British mutton and all the goats within the vicinity of Earls Court were quickly consumed. Men had to be employed solely for the purpose of travelling ever further afield to buy goats.58 While the organisers struggled to provide their workers with acceptable food, they fed their visitors Anglo-Indian curries. In the Curry House visitors could sample ‘Eastern dishes, prepared by a staff of Indian cooks, and placed before [them] by native servants’.59

  Indian cafés and restaurants were a theme at many of these exhibitions. One enterprising Indian waiter, who worked in the Ceylon Tea House at Liverpool’s Royal Jubilee Exhibition in 1887 and at Glasgow’s International Exhibition the following year, published a cookery book: Curries and How to Make Them In England.

  Recipe for Economical Curry Paste from Daniel Santiagoe’s The

  Curry Cook’s Assistant

  1 lb Coriander Seed

  ¼ lb Dry Chillies

  ½ lb Mustard Seed

  2 oz. Garlic

  ½ lb Dried Peas

  2 oz. Cumin Seed

  ½ pint Lucca Oil

  ¼ lb Saffron

  ¼ lb Pepper

  2 oz. Dry Ginger

  ½ lb Salt

  ½ lb Brown Sugar

  ½ pint Vinegar

  N.B. Few Bay Leaves in Ceylon and India. Use Carugapilbay or Curry Leaves, black.

  Grind with vinegar. Put in jar. Cover with Lucca Oil. Use a large spoon for Madras Curries.60

  Ironically, while Londoners enjoyed sampling the chaotic and exciting atmosphere of an Indian town at the Earls Court exhibition, the British who actually lived in India would not have dreamed of setting foot inside one. British cantonments were built at a safe distance away from the Indian townships. One
member of the Raj remembered that as a little girl the Indian town was forbidden to her, even though she longed to ride her pony under the gates into that ‘mysterious and fascinating’ world.61

  The British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in 1924–5 was one of the most successful of all the exhibitions. During its course, 27 million people travelled, as it were, from one end of the empire to another. The Indian section, housed in a pavilion modelled on the Taj Mahal, had the usual mock jungle, jugglers and snake charmers, a display of shikar trophies, a model of the Khyber Pass, and a jumble of Indian goods, including carpets, silks, indigo and tea. The café served curries and pilaus, and the visitor could enjoy a cup of Indian tea ‘under the trees on the north side of the grounds among typical Indian scenery’.62 It was run by Edward Palmer, the founder of E. P. Veeraswamy & Co., Indian Food Specialists, who imported spices, chutneys and curry pastes from India and sold them under the label ‘Nizams’. The company may have been named for Palmer’s grandmother, one of the Indian wives of his grandfather, William Palmer, who founded the banking house of Palmer & Co. at Hyderabad in the late eighteenth century. Indeed, Edward Palmer came from a family of men who had served in India and married Indian women. His great-grandfather, also William, married the beautiful Muslim princess Begum Fyze Baksh, and a painting of the family by Johann Zoffany hangs in the Oriental and India Office Collections at the British Library today.