The British in India never really took to Indian fruit and vegetables. ‘I have often wished for a few good apples and pears in preference to all the different kinds of fruits that Bengal produces,’ wrote a homesick accountant from Calcutta in 1783.20 The Anglo-Indians thought that aubergines and okra tasted slimy and unpleasant. Jean-Baptiste Tavernier described how the East India merchants at all the seventeenth-century European factories planted extensive kitchen gardens with vegetables familiar to them from home, such as ‘salads of several kinds, cabbages, asparagus, peas and principally beans, the seed of which comes from Japan’.21 The Europeans also brought with them newly discovered American vegetables, such as potatoes and tomatoes. It is hard now to imagine Indian food without these European and American vegetables, but in fact it took a long time for many of them to be integrated into Indian cookery.
How the potato came to India is unclear. The Portuguese or the Dutch may have brought the first specimens to the subcontinent, but they were unusual enough in 1780 for the Governor-General Warren Hastings to invite his fellow council members to join him for dinner when he was given a basket of potatoes by the Dutch. Even in Britain at the time potatoes were a novelty, grown by wealthy farmers and professionals in their kitchen gardens, but not yet a part of the staple diet. One of the first things Lord Amherst did as Governor-General in 1823 was to order that potatoes should be planted in the park at Barrackpore.22 The Bengalis took to potatoes with enthusiasm. Their starchy softness contrasted perfectly with the sharp flavours of mustard seeds and cumin which were common in Bengali cookery. By the 1860s they had become an essential ingredient in the region’s diet. From Bengal, potatoes spread inland. An army wife travelling through northern India between 1804 and 1814 reported that ‘the natives are all fond of it, and eat it without scruple’.23 In the south, potatoes took longer to become popular and James Kirkpatrick, resident at the Indian court of Hyderabad, missed them so much that he had a supply of them brought from Bombay with an armed guard through the wars raging in the Deccan. Even today, potatoes are regarded by some Indians with residual suspicion as a new and strange foodstuff, uncategorised by Ayurvedic medicine. The botanist George Watt noticed that the Indians thought they ‘cause[d] indigestion and flatulence’, and orthodox Jains refuse potatoes on the grounds that as root vegetables they possess the ability to generate life and therefore cannot be consumed.24
The Bengali names of many European vegetables indicate that the Bengalis were introduced to them by the British. Tomatoes are referred to as biliti begun or English aubergine. It took longer for tomatoes to become popular, but George Watt noticed in 1880 that although they were still ‘chiefly cultivated for the European population . . . Bengalis and Burmans use [them] in their sour curries’.25 Nineteenth-century tomatoes were sourer than the ones we are accustomed to today and they were particularly well suited to the Bengali style of sweet-and-sour cookery. Other British introductions were pumpkins, known as biliti kumro or English gourd, cabbages, cauliflowers and beans. But while the British changed the vegetables that Indians ate, they did not change the way that Indians cooked their vegetables. Just as Bengalis referred to European vegetables as an English form of an Indian vegetable, they prepared them in the same way as their Indian counterpart.26 As Gandhi commented, ‘simply boiled vegetables are never eaten. I never saw a boiled potato in India’.27 The British had a tremendous impact on the Indian diet. The introduction of European vegetables into the subcontinent significantly widened the range of vegetables available to a largely vegetarian population. However, the British had very little impact on the style and techniques for preparing vegetables.
Orchards in the cool hill stations, and market gardens around the presidency towns, meant that the British were able to buy apples and pears and European vegetables during the cold season. In his ‘Kitchen Calendar’ of available ingredients a ‘Thirty-Five Years’ Resident’ rejoiced in the long list including cauliflowers, potatoes, peas, and beans which were available in December and January, while in July he lamented that ‘the vegetable market is very indifferent . . . potatoes become poor and watery. Young lettuces, cucumbers, and sweet potatoes are now [virtually all that is] procurable.’28 For the rest of the year, and for a variety of other articles, they had to rely on imports from Britain. When Elizabeth Gwillim arrived in Madras in 1801, to start her new life as the wife of a judge, she brought with her two gammons of bacon which made her luncheon parties popular. ‘Sir S Strange and Mr Sallivan . . . came every day whilst the first lasted’, and the gammons were eaten ‘clean to the bone’. Her stores also made her popular with her Indian servants, who particularly liked English pickles. Elizabeth described how ‘their passion for these pickles is so great that they condescend to eat them though made by us whom they account the lowest of all and class with the kamars or outcasts’. These British versions of those bamboo and mango achars, which company sailors had taken home with them in the seventeenth century, had been transformed into strange and enticing delicacies for the Indian servants. Elizabeth was forced to keep the pickle jars locked away and when she required some she would dole out a little at a time on to a saucer and, even then, had to watch carefully that it appeared on the table.29
The process of hermetically sealing food in tins and jars was invented at the beginning of the nineteenth century and Anglo-Indians took full advantage of the new technology. At the European stores in the larger British settlements it was possible to buy hermetically sealed oysters, salmon, asparagus and raspberry jam; even cheese came in tins. But these products were regarded as very expensive as they cost 30 to 40 per cent more than they would have in Britain. The adventurous, who were willing to brave the ‘heat, fatigue and abominations which beset their path’ in the native bazaar, could find ‘capital bargains’.30 At the foot of the hill station of Landour, Fanny Parks discovered a wonderful bazaar where all sorts of European articles could be procured: ‘paté foie gras, bécasses trufflés, sola hats covered with the skins of the pelican, champagne, bareilly couches, shoes, Chinese books, pickles . . . and various incongruous articles’.31 But many handbooks advised that it was cheaper to bring a large store of goods with you and then have a friend or relative send a box out at regular intervals containing
Tart fruits in bottles; jams in patent jars; vinegar; salad oil; mustard; French mustard; pickles and sauces; white salt; caraway seeds; Zante currants and raisins in patent jars; dessert raisins and prunes in bottles; candied and brandy dessert fruits; flavouring essences; biscuits in tins; hams and bacon in tins . . .; cheese in small tins; salmon, lobster, herrings, oysters, sardines, peas, parsnips, Bologna sausages, mushrooms, in tins, cocoa, and chocolate; oatmeal, vermicelli, macaroni; and tapioca; if near Christmas, a jar of mincemeat.32
The vogue for tinned foods began as a result of ‘the fashionable depreciation of things native’33 but it soon grew into a fixed principle. Tinned foods became increasingly important in Anglo-Indian cookery, as they solved the problem of obtaining the necessary ingredients to create a properly British dinner-party menu. At least, they made it possible to create dishes which sounded and looked British. The drawback was that the food in the tins was often rather nasty. The tinning process was not really perfected until the Second World War and the metallic tang of tinned food could give it a ‘nauseous’ flavour. But the British dinner was less about the taste of the food than its symbolism. The Anglo-Indians stuck to their hard bottled peas, tough roasts and slightly metallic pâté de foie gras because it was a daily demonstration of their ability to remain civilised and to uphold British standards.
For Anglo-Indians living in remote stations, tinned foods and boxes from relatives were a rare luxury. Sometimes the closest store with a supply of European goods was at least a day’s journey away. The only available fruit and vegetables were pumpkins, gourds – ‘green, attenuated things like desiccated cucumbers which had no flavour at all’ – okra, bananas and papayas. For meat there was ‘goat-mutton and skinny moorghi [chicken] da
y in day out’, occasionally supplemented with game shot while out hunting. Understandably, many Anglo-Indians living in isolated areas thought a great deal about food, and placed great value on a good cook. A railway engineer and his wife were happy to overlook the fact that Abraham had just come out of prison as he produced such tasty meals.34 Although some misdemeanours could not be ignored. When one memsahib living in a distant outpost on the North-West Frontier discovered that her cook was running a small brothel in one of her spare sheds she had to sack him.35 Nevertheless, even under such difficult circumstances, the majority of Anglo-Indians adhered to the principle that curry was not acceptable for dinner and endured the tedium of tasteless approximations of British food.
One of the places where Anglo-Indian cookery really came into its own was on the railways. After the mutiny in 1857 the British constructed an efficient railway system across the subcontinent, which enabled them to transport troops around the country quickly. The standard of the food served at the station restaurant and in the dining car was similar to that provided at the dak bungalow. The train would ‘stop at a station right out in the country; just a long platform and no sign of civilisation. And there would be no sound, except for the hissing of steam and the occasional slamming of doors. Then a man would come along and say, ‘Lunch, lunch!’ and you’d detrain and walk along the platform to the dining car where you’d get in and sit down and you would be served lunch’.36 Lunch was usually curry or ‘last night’s tepid roast, euphemistically called cold meat, with thin slices of tomato and beetroot called salad’. Dinner was, of course, British: ‘thick or clear soup, fried fish or minced mutton cutlets with a bone stuck in, roast chicken or mutton, custard pudding or soufflé’. The chicken was usually as tough and stringy as dak-bungalow fowls and one English visitor to India was ‘greatly touched when on his last meal in the Madras–Bombay Express he read “Roast Foul” on the menu. He felt rewarded for all the indifferently cooked but correctly spelt fowl he had consumed on India’s railway system.’37
Of course, there were a number of highly skilled Indian cooks who could ‘put to shame the performances of an English one’.38 Goan cooks were especially sought after. It was ‘quite astonishing what [they could] . . . turn out on charcoal and a few bricks, one on top of each other’.39 These cooks introduced vindaloo into the repertoire of Anglo-Indian curries, and cookery books referred to it as a ‘Portuguese curry’. For the British, the Goans applied the techniques of vindaloo to all sorts of meats, with duck being the favourite. By the 1920s a Goan cook had become a marker of status. One of the first things Viola Bayley did, after her husband’s promotion, was to employ a Goan cook. ‘Florian [was] . . . an accomplished chef and pastry-cook. The sweets he made for dinner parties were memorable. There was a toffee basket filled with fresh fruit and cream, and a meringue trifle, and ice-cream castles of fabulous design.’40 The Goans had preserved the Portuguese talent for magical desserts and the British enthused over their chocolates, fondants and sugar-coated fruits. A classic Anglo-Indian dish known as beveca, made from sugar, rice flour, coconut cream and rose water, was a simplified version of the Goan layered coconut cake, bebinca.41
Recipe for Beevica (Portuguese Dish) from
The Art of Ceylon and Indian Cookery
INGREDIENTS: – 1 measure of rice flour, 3 large cocoanuts, 8 eggs, 1½ lbs. unshelled almonds, sugar to taste.
MODE: Broil the rice flour, add the thick milk of the cocoanuts, 8 eggs well beaten, ground almonds and sugar to taste. Mix well together and bake in a round shallow tin.42
When the viceroy, Lord Reading (1921–5), visited the tiny princely state of Bahawalpur (sandwiched between the Punjab, Sind and Baluchistan) to install the new nawab on his throne, arrangements were made for a splendid Anglo-Indian-style banquet in his honour. ‘Goan cooks and waiters, complete with the ingredients of the meal, were specially brought from Lahore, two hundred and fifty miles away.’ For the sake of the honoured guests, ‘it had to be an English meal consisting of soup, tinned paté, salmon, also out of a tin, with white sauce, a variety of roast birds, caramel custard pudding, Kemp’s bottled coffee and a savoury on toast’. The Indian guests looked forward to this rare opportunity to taste the prestigious food of their rulers but they were ‘greatly disappointed’. They thought the plain boiled fish, ‘unsalted and unseasoned roast meats’, and the odd baked pudding were completely tasteless, while the unfamiliar knives and forks turned the meal into ‘quite an ordeal. They longed for the spicy, saffron-tinted cuisine of the palace cooks.’43
For the British the symbolic weight of English food was more important than the fact that it was bland and uninteresting. Soup and roast meat, custard and pudding, were all essential elements in the maintenance of prestige. Those Indians who adopted the cuisine of their rulers did so for similar reasons. Nawab Sadaat Ali Khan of Lucknow (1798–1814) employed a French, an English and an Indian cook, and the wife of a British army officer observed that ‘three distinct dinners’ were served at his table. By the time Sadaat Ali Khan came to the throne he was well aware that the tide was turning in favour of the British. Before his accession he had spent many years in Calcutta, and when he returned to Lucknow he set about Anglicising the court. Besides the French chef, he brought with him a suitcase packed with an English admiral’s uniform, a parson’s outfit and some of the latest fashions in wigs. He redecorated the palace in English style with ‘gilt chairs, chaises longues, dining tables, swagged velvet curtains and a profusion of chandeliers and girandoles’, and the various different dinners were all served on the best English china.44
Sadaat Ali Khan was one of the first in a long line of Indian princes who incorporated the dominant culture of the British into their courts. By the end of the nineteenth century many Indian princes had received English educations, either from an English tutor, or at a public school, in either Britain or India. A great many of them led semi-Indian, semi-European lives. Often their wives maintained the Indian side of things, continuing to live in separate quarters, furnished in Indian style, and wearing traditional dress, while in their kitchens they supervised the preparation of exquisite Indian dishes. In contrast, the public areas of the palace were a statement of the successful acquisition of British culture, in the furnishings, the food served on the dining tables and the daily routine of the ruler himself. The Gaekwar of Baroda is a good example. Just before the First World War he was visited by the tiresomely sycophantic Reverend Edward St Clair Weeden, who wrote a book about his visit in which he described the Gaekwar’s daily routine: chota haziri (little breakfast), followed by a ride, breakfast and a morning playing billiards and receiving visitors. After tiffin the maharaja worked while his son and his guest took a rest, played tennis or cricket or went for a drive. Dinner was succeeded by billiards, bridge and bed. The Gaekwar employed a number of English servants, including a valet, ‘a capital fellow named Neale from the Army’, a French cook, and an English maître d’hôtel who had been butler to Lord Ampthill when he was Governor of Madras.
The Gaekwar’s dining habits established his status as a gentleman. His breakfasts, Weeden claimed, were ‘very much what you would get at a first class restaurant in London’. At dinner there were ‘two menus, as the ladies [the maharani and her daughter] may prefer to have Indian dishes, which are served on large golden trays, placed before them on the table’. The maharani insisted that he should taste some of these Indian dishes. Rather churlishly, Weeden complained that this ‘made the dinner rather long’, although he did enthuse over her pilaus: ‘made of beautifully cooked dry rice, chicken, raisins, almonds and spicy stuffing, covered with gold or silver leaf which gives it a very gay look. It is served with a most delicious white sauce flavoured with orange or pineapple.’45 Weeden seems to have been unaware that his hostess was something of a gourmet. Her granddaughter remembered that the food from her kitchen was always superb, whether it was ‘the Indian chef who was presiding or . . . the cook for English food’. ‘She spent endless time and
trouble consulting with her cooks, planning menus to suit the different guests . . . Her kitchen was particularly well known for the marvellous pickles it produced and for the huge succulent prawns from the estuary.’46
The maharani of Baroda passed this love of fine food on to her daughter, Princess Indira, who married into the princely family of Cooch Behar. This family employed three cooks: ‘one for English, one for Bengali and one for Maratha food’. (Cooch Behar is in Bengal and Princess Indira was a Maratha princess.) Each had his own kitchen, scullery and assistants. The Cooch Beharis were a very modern, westernised family. They moved in the best circles of British as well as Indian society and travelled widely in Europe. Princess Indira was thus exposed to a variety of cuisines. She encouraged her kitchen staff ‘to experiment and introduced them to all kinds of unfamiliar dishes’. She is said to have taken one of her cooks to Alfredo’s in Rome because she wanted him to understand what Alfredo’s pasta tasted like. Thus, some princely households outdid the British on their own ground. The British food served at their tables was not the boarding-house level common in Anglo-Indian society but demonstrated a mastery of the various sophisticated cuisines of Europe.47 Other princely families just went through the form of consuming European food, without caring for it. Prakash Tandon witnessed this phenomenon among a family of maharajas in Hyderabad in the 1930s. Invited to lunch by a prospective son-in-law of the family, Tandon was eager to escape ‘the eternal roast mutton and Anglo-Indian curry at the hotel’ and went along expecting ‘a moghlai feast’:
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