Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  Palmer had an interest in producing authentic Indian food. In a cookery book which he published in 1936, he insisted that it was possible, using his curry powder, to make a ‘proper curry . . . equal to the very best made in India’, as long as the cook fried or grilled the powder to rid it of its raw taste before adding it to the dish. He also specified that flour should ‘on no account’ be used to thicken curries and that apples and sultanas did not belong in a curry.63 When the Wembley exhibition closed Edward decided to establish the café in a permanent home at 101 Regent Street, and Veeraswamy’s opened in 1926. The successor to Sake Dean Mahomed’s Hindostanee Coffee House, it is the oldest surviving Indian restaurant in Britain today. Decorated with lights from the Maharaja of Mysore’s palace, cane chairs and potted palms, it retained the Raj atmosphere of the exhibition café. The waiters were specially imported from India, and wore the bearers’ uniforms of British India. The food which the restaurant served was also firmly Raj: duck vindaloo and Madras curry. The restaurant was patronised by nostalgic Anglo-Indians and the rich and fashionable, including the Prince of Wales.

  Green coriander chutney

  This is a fresh chutney which should be made just before it is required. It is difficult to give precise amounts for the ingredients in this sort of dish. It is best to keep tasting it and adjust the flavour as you make it. It tastes good with idlis (you can buy packet mixes from Indian grocers if making them from scratch seems intimidating). It is also good as a side dish with coconut-based curries and with grilled fish.

  Large bunch of fresh green coriander (the size you can buy at vegetable markets rather than the tiny packets you can buy in supermarkets)

  100–200ml coconut milk, or fresh coconut, grated

  1–6 fresh green chillies, chopped

  1cm piece of fresh ginger, chopped

  2–3 cloves of garlic, chopped

  a handful of raw peanuts (if you only have salted ones, add less salt)

  salt to taste

  sugar to taste

  lemon or lime juice to taste

  Wash the coriander and blend it in a food mixer with the other ingredients until it is smooth. Add more coconut milk or lemon juice if you need extra liquid. Keep tasting and when it is sharp, tangy, bright green and smooth it is ready.

  Our Cook Room

  7

  Cold Meat Cutlets: British food in India

  IN OCTOBER 1873, John William Laing arrived in Bombay to spend five months on a sightseeing tour of India. He stayed with friends in Malabar Hill, an exclusive area of Bombay, and in his diary he wrote down the menu for the dinner he was served on 28 October:

  Gravy soup

  Fillets of fish Parsley Sauce

  Entrées

  Breast Mutton Compôte

  Joint

  Mutton Chicken Pie

  Second Course

  Italian Eggs

  Pudding

  Lemon Custard Baked1

  Curry did not feature, neither in the form of the Mughlai food familiar to the East India Company merchants, nor as bowls of Anglo-Indian curry and rice.

  Although he noted down what he ate, John Laing saw no reason to comment on the food or the manner in which it was served. By the 1870s ‘a person fresh from England’ found nothing unusual in Anglo-Indian dining habits. Just as it was in Britain, the dinner was served at seven or eight in the evening; the men and women wore evening dress; the food was served on the best Wedgwood china, imported from Staffordshire, and eaten with elegant silverware; and the champagne or claret was drunk from fine crystal glasses. One or two attentive servants changed the dishes and removed the plates as each course was brought to the table. Despite the alien surroundings, the late-nineteenth-century Anglo-Indian dinner party faithfully reproduced the food and table etiquette of the urban bourgeoisie in Britain.

  All the hallmarks of the burra khana had been eradicated. The crowds of servants, which had surprised Fanny Parks in the 1820s, had been greatly reduced. In the 1830s Anglo-Indians had begun printing ‘No hookahs’ in the corner of their dinner invitations, and by the 1870s the pipes no longer bubbled quietly behind every chair. The airy white linen the gentlemen used to wear had been exchanged for respectable black evening dress. As early as 1838, a visitor to India was pleased to discover that ‘French cookery is generally patronised, and the beef and mutton oppressions of ten years since are exploded’. The huge saddles of mutton, the hams and the turkeys had been replaced with ‘made’ dishes, served in separate courses. Moreover, curry and rice had been dropped from the menu. A review of a cookery book in a Calcutta periodical in 1879 noted with satisfaction that ‘the molten curries and florid oriental compositions of the olden time . . . have been gradually banished from our dinner tables’.2 As Victorian Britain was enthusiastically embracing the idea of empire, and curry was becoming a favoured dish among the middle classes, Anglo-Indians were busily eradicating as many traces of India as possible from their culture.

  This change in dining habits demonstrated a desire to keep up with fashions back at home. In the early nineteenth century it had been commonplace for visitors to India to refer to the uncouth nature of Anglo-Indian society. One handbook snootily asserted that to anyone who had ‘been accustomed to move in the good circles of England, the contrast must be striking, and we apprehend, unfavourable to the Anglo-Indian community’.3 The author went on to state that in India ‘in little appertaining to the table . . . is the comme il faut thoroughly understood’.4 But Anglo-India was changing. More women were beginning to arrive in the colony, and the introduction of steamships and an overland route to India via Egypt improved communications with Britain. Gradually, the rough and ready nabobs began to lose ground to a new group of Anglo-Indians – the sahibs and memsahibs – who resented the implication that they were nothing more than nouveau-riche parochials and concentrated their efforts on maintaining civilised standards, even in the remote wilds of India. Advocates of the new utilitarian and evangelical ideologies were also beginning to arrive. They argued that British officials were not in India to run the country for a money-grubbing trading company but to bring to its backward and impoverished people the benefits of civilisation. The men to carry out this programme needed to be fine upstanding representatives of Englishness. Nabobs who smoked the hookah, lazed about in cool white linen, and kept an Indian mistress in the purdah quarters of their bungalow began to give way to black-coated bureaucrats. After the abolition of the East India Company in 1858, the racial theories of the latter half of the century emphasised the need for both the civil servant and the military officer to demonstrate the superiority of the British race. The gentlemanly product of the public schools was promoted as the ideal colonial ruler. These were young men who were supposedly self-reliant, decisive, independent and athletic, with a strong sense of their own authority, and, most importantly, they were thought to be capable of upholding British prestige at all times.

  As part of the imperial project to maintain prestige, curry and rice were demoted: ‘A well considered curry, or mulligatawni – capital things in their way, – [were] still frequently given at breakfast or luncheon’, and curry was the main dish out in camp, on long journeys, at dak bungalows, and in a variety of informal settings. But to serve a curry for the evening meal was now frowned upon. In Victorian Britain, dinner was the central meal of the day and it was therefore singled out by the Anglo-Indians as the most important meal, when they concentrated on demonstrating their Britishness. Many complained that it was absurd to don black evening dress in the stifling Indian heat and sit down to eat roast beef and suet puddings but this was precisely what the British did. Cookery books were published which instructed the memsahib ‘how best to produce, under the special circumstances of the country, the dishes approved by the taste of polite society at home’.5 The recipes inside Wyvern’s Indian Cookery Book and The Wife’s Cookery Book being Recipes and Hints on Indian Cookery were not for the curries and Indian pilaus which one might have expected, but for che
ese crumb croquettes, thick kidney soup, sole au gratin, stewed beef with oysters, toad in the hole, Yorkshire pudding, and white sauce.6 This was a selection of dishes which could have come from Mrs Beeton. What the memsahibs tried to achieve was the same plain, wholesome British home cooking, mixed with the occasional dash of French sophistication, which was current in Victorian Britain. The results, however, tended to be disappointing. On the whole Anglo-Indian British food was ‘monotonous, tasteless, and not nourishing’. One missionary who lived in India in the 1930s referred to it as ‘pseudo-European’.7 What the memsahibs created was a second branch of Anglo-Indian cookery. The pseudo-Indian curries, mulligatawny soup and kedgeree of the first half of the nineteenth century were now joined by an array of slightly orientalised British dishes.

  A variety of circumstances conspired against the Anglo-Indians’ attempts to produce palatable approximations of British food in India. Firstly, the Muslim cooks the British usually employed were hampered by their lack of personal experience of the food they were trying to produce. The Indian cook could not hold up the taste of his salmon mayonnaise or plum pudding against the memory of a meal eaten in Britain. This, combined with the fact that Indian and British cookery were very different, meant that it was extremely difficult for them to form an accurate concept of what they were aiming for. The result was a long line of cooks trained in a culinary style of which they had no personal understanding, each one passing down his own eccentric and peculiar interpretations of British dishes, until they eventually became engrained in the Indian understanding of British cookery. This could lead to some truly awful misunderstandings. One army officer was eventually forced to sack his cook because he insisted on indiscriminately adding vanilla to every single dish he cooked whether it was beef olives, grilled fish, or bread and butter pudding.8 Divorced from culinary developments in Britain, Anglo-Indian cookery inevitably developed into an independent branch of cuisine.

  A variety of British dishes underwent a process of orientalisation. Meat casseroles, usually made with carrots and celery in a wine-based sauce, thickened with flour, were livened up with Indian spice mixtures (masalas). The results were neither curries nor casseroles but something in between. Anglo-Indian cookery used the cuts of meat familiar to the British, and the same methods of roasting and grilling, but the treatment given to the meat was often distinctively Indian. Rather than stuffing chicken with breadcrumbs and herbs, the Anglo-Indians’ cooks smothered the meat in coriander, cumin and pepper and created masala roasts. In Britain, cooks would thriftily use up leftover cold meat by mincing it and then covering it in mashed potatoes. These ‘chops’ or ‘cutlets’ were then dipped in egg and coated in breadcrumbs and fried. In India, the memsahibs taught their kitchen staff this method for using up leftovers, but the cooks added their own distinctive masala mixtures to the mince or mashed potato to produce spicy Anglo-Indian ‘cutlets’.

  Recipe for cold meat Cutlets from Indian Cookery ‘Local’ for

  Young Housekeepers

  Materials. One lb. of cold Beef or mutton minced fine and pounded on a board with the ‘Koitha’ [a long knife used with a wooden board]. Moisten the mince with a little gravy or broth, add a minced onion, with its juice pressed out, some pounded spice and pepper, a few leaves of chopped mint, a green chilly, and a slice of bread soaked in water and well squeezed. Salt to taste. Put the meat pulp and the other ingredients together, mix well with a raw egg, form the mixture into balls, put a layer of bread crumbs on the board and lay on it a ball of meat, form it into the shape of a cutlet, sprinkle a thick layer of crumbs over, and fry the cutlets brown in ghee or dripping.9

  The Indianisation of French cuisine began with the names of the dishes which were frequently ‘strangely transmogrified’. George Cunningham, an Indian civil servant in the 1920s, sent home a menu for

  Consumme Royal

  Beef Filit Bianis

  Roast Fowl

  Girring Piece Souply

  Putindiala Jumban

  Dupundiala Promison

  What do you make of the enclosed menu, the joint result of one of Mugh cook’s kitchen French and a Hindu Babu? The beef fillet bearnaise and the green pea soufflé are fairly easy, but ‘pouding a la jambou’ (it was made to look like ham) is not so obvious, and the ‘Permesan’ savoury beats me. It was little rounds of cheese pastry with cheesy eggs on top but I can’t think what word he is driving at.10

  The results were not always unpleasing. Bland, cream-based sauces were given some bite with a dash of Worcestershire sauce or a pinch of cayenne pepper. But the Indianisation of French cuisine did produce some spectacularly unappetising concoctions. Lady Minto, the wife of the viceroy (1905–10), dutifully copied into her cookery notebook a recipe for Soufflé de Volaille Indiénne which required a mousse of chicken and curry sauce to be poured into a soufflé case. Once set, a circle of the mousse was removed and the hole filled with mulligatawny jelly mixed with rounds of chicken and tongue. This was served with a salad of rice and tomatoes mixed with mayonnaise and curry.11

  Matters were not helped by the fact that many memsahibs had no idea how to cook themselves. They arrived in India with a clear idea of how British food should taste, but no real notion of how this was achieved. Many had left home when they were very young and had no experience of running a household. The problem of inexperience was made worse by the fact that their knowledge of Indian languages was often limited to a few words spoken in the imperative. Some cookbooks tried to solve this problem by printing the recipes in Indian languages. This was all very well if one was lucky enough to employ a literate cook but even then things could go awry. What to Tell the Cook, or the Native Cook’s Assistant, which printed the names of the recipes in English and the rest in Tamil, cheerfully asserted that it would ‘save the house-keeper the trouble of describing the modus-operandi’. But the second edition followed the suggestions of several readers and printed the English text on the opposite page.12 Obviously some housekeepers wished to try and locate the reason for the cook’s failed attempts at buttered crab and Snowden pudding.

  Indian conditions were unfavourable to British ways of preparing meat. In Britain, carcasses were normally hung for a few days after the animals were slaughtered. In the Indian climate this was out of the question, and the flesh had to be cooked the same day that it was killed. Roasting, grilling or boiling did not help to make such tough meat any more palatable. Indian methods of stewing chicken in curries, or slowly tenderising mutton in dum pukht dishes, or mincing and grinding beef or lamb into a fine paste before roasting it, were much more suitable for dealing with freshly killed meat. Some memsahibs acknowledged defeat and ‘gave up ordering roast chicken. The too recently killed victim tasted better if gently stewed or made into a curry.’13

  Indian kitchens were not really set up for the preparation of British dishes. The kitchen equipment was usually a grinding stone, a few large pots, a spit, a kettle and a simple wood-fired oven. Even if the cook was provided with a table he would usually ignore it and conduct most of his tasks sitting or crouching on the floor. In the early nineteenth century, Thomas Williamson warned that only those with strong stomachs should investigate the cook room. The sight of the cook basting the chicken with a bunch of its own feathers was likely to turn ‘delicate stomachs’, and to catch the cook in the act of using the same implement to butter toast, was quite off-putting. Similar warnings were still being issued in the 1880s and one handbook advised ‘either . . . visit the kitchen daily, and see that it has been properly cleaned out, or never go to it at all’.14 Many Anglo-Indians adopted the latter piece of advice and cheerfully followed Williamson’s line of thought that if ‘the dinner, when brought to the table, looks well, and tastes well: appetite . . . prevents the imagination from travelling back to the kitchen’.15 Sometimes this suppression of the imagination was exercised even though the food was demonstrably unpleasant. One memsahib, very new to India, was horrified to discover that her breakfast of semolina porridge was full �
�of little cooked worms. It could almost be called worm porridge.’ In a small, frightened voice she commented on the worms. This brought the spoons of her breakfast companions to a halt, but she had the decided feeling that her ‘host felt he had been most unreasonably deprived of his breakfast’. After some time in India she gave up trying to eradicate worms from flour and came to the conclusion that it is ‘Better to come to reasonable terms with Nature in the East’.16 For the more concerned memsahib, life turned into a constant struggle with the servants. She would spend her days doling out the supplies, watching to see that the milk and water were properly boiled, picking through the flour for worms, and worrying that the moment her back was turned the cook would revert to unhygienic habits.

  India constantly conspired against the stuffy attempts of the British to impose a veneer of grandeur on their lives. In any Anglo-Indian house all one had to do to destroy the illusion of effortless elegance, so carefully created in the dining room, was to step on to the back verandah. Here one would discover a host of Indian servants: one pulling the punkah, some sleeping, others washing up or boiling a kettle for tea.17 Indeed, it was the very servants who were essential to constructing this atmosphere of grandeur who so often introduced a false note or an atmosphere of tension. Bearers were in the habit of burping in the presence of their masters, butlers would demonstrate dissatisfaction by ‘snuffling . . . loudly and offensively’ while serving dinner.18 Even the respectful blank stare which many Indian servants adopted had the uneasy effect of making one feel negated. Besides, there was always the sneaking feeling that the smooth show of subservience concealed an attitude of contempt. Of course, many Anglo-Indians felt great affection for their servants, but even then this did not always mean that they were particularly competent. One family was blessed with ‘a disarmingly gentle’ ‘Cookie’ who would sit rocking their dog in his arms whenever it was ill. Naturally this meant that there was no supper, but this did not matter as much as it might have done, as he was an ‘abominable’ cook.19