Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  Spiced tea or masala chai

  These are two ways to make that ‘unsavoury . . . decoction’, spiced tea, which the tea hawkers sold in the Cawnpore Mill area in the 1930s to the disapproval of the Tea Association campaigners. (See overleaf for the second method.)

  4 tablespoons ground ginger

  2 tablespoons whole black peppercorns

  2 tablespoons green cardamom seeds

  1 tablespoon whole cloves

  pot of tea

  milk and sugar, to taste

  Grind the spices in a clean coffee grinder. Store the powder in an air-tight container and add ½ teaspoon to a pot of tea. Serve with milk and sugar.

  Rebecca’s masala chai

  950ml water

  16 whole cardamoms, slightly crushed

  2 cinnamon sticks

  120ml milk

  75g strong black tea leaves

  honey or sugar to taste

  Bring the water to a boil in a large pan and add the cardamoms and cinnamon sticks. Simmer for 15–20 minutes.

  In a separate pan bring the milk to just below boiling point and set aside.

  Add the tea leaves to the simmering water and then remove from the heat. Steep for 3–5 minutes.

  Strain the leaves and spices and add the milk and honey or sugar to sweeten. Serve immediately. Serves 6.

  Lassi

  These days lassis are made with yogurt. Bombay lassis are often made with buffalo-milk yogurt which is very good for this purpose.

  200ml yogurt

  50ml iced water (or chips of ice)

  sugar or honey to taste (about 2 tablespoons)

  Optional additions

  ⅛ teaspoon cardamom powder

  2 teaspoons ground almonds or pistachios

  salt and ½ teaspoon of garam masala to make a sour lassi

  Put the ingredients in a blender and blend until the contents become foamy. Serves 2.

  Mango buttermilk lassi

  Originally, Punjabis made their lassis with the buttermilk which was a by-product of manufacturing ghee.

  250ml mango purée (or use any other fruit purée which takes your fancy)

  450ml buttermilk (if you prefer you can use yogurt)

  1 teaspoon lemon juice

  ½ teaspoon salt

  1 tablespoon honey

  pinch of nutmeg

  10 crushed ice cubes

  Put the ingredients in a blender and blend until the contents become foamy. Serves 3–4.

  Nimbu pani

  This refreshing drink is served all over India and is a very good way to rehydrate the body after a day in the heat.

  juice of 3–4 limes

  2 teaspoons of sugar

  pinch of salt

  a little freshly ground black pepper

  200ml chilled water

  Mix the lime juice, sugar, salt and pepper with the water and pour over ice cubes in a chilled glass. Serves 1.

  Indian employees at Veeraswamy’s in the 1920s

  9

  Curry and Chips: Syhleti sailors

  and Indian takeaways

  THERE ARE ABOUT eight thousand Indian restaurants in Britain and the great majority of these are run by Bangladeshis. Most of these Bangladeshis come from the Seaman’s Zone at the centre of the small district of Syhlet.

  Syhlet is a predominantly Muslim, jungly, tea-growing district on the north-eastern border with Assam. During the Mughal period the district was known for the sweet oranges that grew there, and the Emperor Jahangir noticed that ‘in the province of Syhlet, which is a dependency of Bengal, it was the custom for the people of those parts to make eunuchs of some of their sons and give them to the governor in place of revenue’.1 It was where Thackeray’s grandfather made his fortune by capturing elephants to sell to the East India Company. The British particularly liked the sweet oranges, but it is not an area famous for culinary achievements. The most distinctive speciality from Syhlet is rotten punti fish. The fish, which abounds in the lakes that cover the region, is put into earthenware pots and covered with mustard oil, and then the pots are sealed and buried in the ground. By the time they are dug up again, the fish has fermented into an oily paste which the Syhletis fry with chillies and eat as a pickle, or add to fish curries to give them a ‘cheesy flavour’.2

  During the Raj, Syhlet was strategically important due to a series of waterways flowing through the district which provided a short cut between the Assam tea plantations and the port of Calcutta. In the 1840s, the British introduced steamships into these byways and rivers. The Syhleti boatmen, who until now had made a living paddling serenely along the peaceful waterways, found themselves stoking the fires down in the engine rooms of the steamships. Many set off for Calcutta in search of work. A change in the shipping regulations in 1849 meant that the demand for cheap and hard-working lascars, as Indian sailors are known, had increased enormously.3 Syhlet’s surplus boatmen found employment on the ocean-going steamships. Their lack of education meant that they were unable to get the more desirable deck work which required a knowledge of English because the deckhands needed to be able to communicate with the British officers. Instead, Syhletis were employed in the engine rooms where it was nerve-grindingly noisy. The job of stoking the huge boilers with coal was unbearably hot and on occasion men would die of heatstroke. Worse still, the boilers were prone to exploding, maiming and killing the firemen. Such appalling work was not well rewarded. In 1937, a Syhleti fireman earned £2.1.0. a month, one-fifth of the wages of a white fireman. Even during the Second World War, when lascars were risking their lives on the boats, they were paid a war bonus of only £2 compared to £10 for white sailors.4 Given the conditions and the poor wages it is unsurprising that these Syhleti firemen were notorious for jumping ship. They could be found eking out a living in all the major ports from Rangoon and Singapore to Southampton and New York.5

  For lascars, a network of grubby boarding houses, run by ex-sailors and their wives, had existed in London’s East End since the nineteenth century. These were the places where the missionary Joseph Salter discovered lascars smoking opium and gambling away their earnings. By the beginning of the twentieth century, these boarding houses were a little more respectable. One of the most famous was run by Mr Ali, a Bengali, who had set it up with the help of his shipping company on the Victoria Dock Road, Canning Town. Nearby, he ran a small coffee shop, where the seamen could buy curry and rice.

  During the 1920s and 30s, a number of others followed Mr Ali’s example and by the beginning of the 1940s there were boarding houses and cafés catering for the Syhleti seamen at Sandy Row, Brick Lane, New Road and Commercial Road. These seamen’s cafés were the roots from which Indian restaurants in Britain were to grow.6 They were meant to cater for ordinary seamen waiting for their ships to sail, but they also provided a support network for the steady trickle of deserters. Razaur Rahman Jagirdar, for example, jumped ship during a bombing raid on London in the 1940s. He spent a terrifying night out on the streets with the bombs dropping around him. In the morning he was relieved to find the Syhleti café on Commercial Road. From there he was directed to the basement Gathor Café at 36 Percy Street, in the West End. Here he discovered what was in effect ‘a Community centre for the Syhletis’. Through the café he found somewhere to live: a terraced four-bedroom house which he shared with between thirty-five and forty other Syhletis.7 Overcrowded and poor accommodation was the norm for deserting seamen. Nawab Ali, who jumped ship in Cardiff during the war, ended up sleeping on a fold-out bed in the kitchen of a house on Commercial Road. It was also difficult to find work. One Syhleti seaman, who lived in London in the 1930s, recalled that his fellow boarders made their money by raffling chocolate in pubs, peddling clothes, or selling toffee on the streets.8 Most jobs were in catering. Nearly all of the 150 Syhletis known to Razaur Rahman Jagirdar in the West End worked as kitchen porters, cleaners or washers-up, in restaurants, clubs and hotels.9

  Like the majority of his fellow Syhletis, Nawab Ali began his c
areer in catering – cleaning, washing up and peeling potatoes – working in an Egyptian coffee shop on Cannon Street Road. Through a friend he moved on to the Savoy, where he kept the kitchen clean, and then on to Veeraswamy’s, where he was given the task of putting rice on the plates. He was instructed to put one cupful on each plate, but the customers rarely ate all of it. ‘The rice that came back used to fill two dustbins, and I didn’t like the rice to go in the dustbin.’ Rice is the most important ingredient in any Bangladeshi meal, and Bangladeshis hate to waste it. To throw away rice is like throwing away money.10 Nawab Ali therefore reduced the amount he put on each plate and compensated by spreading the rice around the plate instead. On a visit to the kitchens the owner noticed what he was doing and was pleased to discover such economising initiative among his staff. He left Ali a generous tip and gave him a rise. Unfortunately, this made him unpopular with the rest of the staff, and, as he did not like quarrelling, he left the job.11

  Veeraswamy’s was one of a handful of Indian restaurants in London in the 1940s. An offshoot from the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, it served Anglo-Indian curries to rich and fashionable Londoners and retired civil servants who felt nostalgic for their old home. A one-time general secretary of the Pakistan Caterers Association can also remember a restaurant known as Abdullah’s, somewhere around Old Compton Street in the 1920s. This was run by ‘an expert cook . . . from Bombay’, and Buckingham Palace were even said to have placed orders with Abdullah who had been recommended to them by the Indian Secretary of State.12 Two other restaurants catered to London’s population of Indian students. Shafi’s on Gerard Street might as well have been the London Indian Student Centre. The middle-class equivalent of the Gathor Café on Percy Street, it was a comforting home from home for lonely students. The young author Atia Hosain, who had stayed on in London after 1947 as she was reluctant to return to a partitioned India, spent a lot of time at Shafi’s ‘because it was a rendezvous for Indians’. She came from a Muslim family for whom ‘food and companionship went naturally together, Shafi’s was like being back home. The owner was host, friend and confidant to all who came, whether to eat or just to relax and talk. Never in India had I found myself alone at a meal. It would have been unthinkable not to share food with friends and relatives.’13 Shafi’s was set up in 1920 by the Mohammed brothers from northern India. They came to Britain to study but, having discovered that Indian food was hard to find, they saw a good market opportunity and went into business. Bir Bahadur was another Indian student from Delhi, who opened up the Kohinoor on Roper Street in the West End. His restaurant was so successful that he brought his brothers Sordar and Shomsar over from India to help him establish a chain. By 1948, there was a Bahadur Taj Mahal in Brighton, Oxford, Cambridge, Manchester and Northampton.14 These pioneering Indian restaurants all employed ex-seamen in their kitchens and an extremely high proportion of the Syhletis living in Britain in the 1940s and 50s worked in them at one time or another. It was the ambition of many of the seamen to set up restaurants of their own and

  The Kohinoor . . . was the main training centre for many Bangladeshis for[a] long time. All the Bahadur brothers were kind hearted, they never took advantage of the poverty of their employees and always treated them well. Nearly all the first generation of Bangladeshis who owned Indian restaurants in the UK in the earlier days, learnt their trade from the Bahadur brothers. They learnt the skill of cooking and serving, also management, step by step. Even those who worked for Veeraswamy’s restaurant or other Indian restaurants also came to Bahadur at last to have their final training.15

  By the end of the war there were plenty of bombed-out cafés in need of renovation. The Syhleti seamen used their hard-earned savings to buy up these derelict cafés and small, down-at-heel fish-and-chip shops. Britain’s ethnic minorities were already well established in the fish-and-chip trade. The earliest fish fryers had been Jewish immigrants to London’s East End, and virtually all the fish-and-chip shops in Scotland and Ireland were owned by Italian immigrants. In the 1950s and 60s, Chinese and Greek Cypriot immigrants, as well as Syhletis, began buying them up.16 The Syhletis would often spot a good location by looking out for a Chinese takeaway. They knew that ‘if they opened a restaurant where there was a successful Chinese it would do well’.17 When fish and chips were first sold in the nineteenth century, they were seen as slum food, the sort of thing prostitutes ate as they came off the beat. But they were gradually taken up by the working classes and by the 1950s they made a welcome change for many families from the monotony of roast on Sunday, hash on Monday, cottage pie on Tuesday, hotpot on Thursday and stewed steak and chips on Friday. In working-class towns there would be a rush on the fish-and-chip shop after eleven o’clock as the men made their way home from the pub, and at the weekends they would be full of men buying a quick lunch on their way to the football game.18

  The fish-and-chip shops’ new Syhleti owners gave them a fresh lick of paint, bought new tables and chairs, and set about building up custom. After he left Veeraswamy’s Nawab Ali followed this path. In 1943, after a spell of work in the factories in Coventry, he had saved enough money to buy a small coffee shop at 11 Settles Street. It was a good spot as it was near the Labour Exchange and ‘all kinds of different people’ would drop in – ‘English, Indians, Arabs, Africans’. He redecorated but did not change its name, or the menu, as he did not want to put off the old customers. ‘We sold tea, coffee, rice and curry, fish and chips – all the usual things.’19 Many Syhleti restaurant owners started out this way, and the names they gave their establishments – the Anglo-Asia or the Anglo-Pakistan – reflected the cultural mix of Syhleti owner and predominantly white customers. The Syhletis continued to provide their customers with the traditional fish and chips and hot pies, and simply tacked curry on to the old menu. They also continued the pattern of staying open after 11 p.m. to catch the trade as the pubs were closing. Unfortunately, this meant that they attracted plenty of drunken, bad-mannered and violent customers. Gradually, the white customers became more adventurous and started to try the curries. In this way the British working classes discovered that a good hot vindaloo went down particularly well on a stomach full of beer, and the tradition developed of eating a curry after a night out in the pub. As the customers became increasingly fond of curry, these small cafés and old chip shops jettisoned the British dishes from their menus and turned into Indian takeaways and inexpensive Indian restaurants.

  Nawab Ali’s next venture was a Maltese café in Cardiff which he bought for £350, a price he negotiated with the help of a prostitute. Rather than trying to keep the old menu and the old style, he changed the name straight away, to the Calcutta restaurant, and offered an entirely Indian menu.20 A number of such ventures sprung up around Britain in the forties and fifties, usually with exotic-sounding names, like the Shah-Jalal and Khayam. Syhletis dominated the restaurant trade. Nawab Ali commented, ‘I will tell you why there were too many Syhletis. It was because we all helped each other: I brought twenty men myself, [before the war] . . . and I must have brought two hundred from the ship in the war, so if each of them helped twenty more . . . you see how it happened. Of course in those days we never imagined there would be so many people – we just wanted to help our brothers.’21 Engine-room crews were ‘close knit . . . all the men coming from neighbouring villages, and often related to one another’. This pattern of emigration had a profound impact on particular Syhleti villages. The first group of emigrants never intended to stay in Britain and many sailors and restaurant owners returned to their villages comparatively wealthy men. Known as ‘Londonis’ in Syhlet, they built themselves stone Londoni houses with indoor bathrooms and painted verandahs while the rest of the villagers continued to live in thatched mud huts. Land prices soared in the migrant districts and the women sang a song with the lines, ‘How can I accept that my husband has gone to London? . . . The land will be empty – what will I do?’22

  After he jumped ship in 1937, Haji Shirajul Islam found w
ork in a series of restaurants. First he prepared himself by practising reading a menu written in unfamiliar English, over and over again. This worked and he landed a job at the India Burma restaurant on Leicester Square. But he hated it: ‘Oh – morning to midnight you got to work . . . One calling this way another calling that way – what to do?’ He moved on to the Khayam restaurant off Tottenham Court Road, but here too the demands were too much for him. There were two flights of stairs between the restaurant and the kitchen which meant the waiters were constantly running up and down. The manager reminded him, when he was late one day, that he was expected to work a twelve-hour day. Indignant that ‘actually it was not twelve hours . . . fifteen hours, eighteen hours we worked’ (for fifteen shillings a week), he announced at half past nine in the evening that he had done his twelve hours and was leaving unless he was paid overtime. To his surprise he did not lose his job. The work was so hateful, however, that he left and lived off the Labour Exchange in between jobs on ships. After the war he was driven back into the restaurant business. But he returned to the business as a restaurant owner, which was not quite as bad.23 Each new wave of deserters followed a similar path to that of Haji Shirajul Islam. Thus, by the time South Asian immigration into Britain began to increase in the 1960s, the Syhletis already dominated the Indian food business in Britain.