Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  In the 1980s, Pakistani restaurateurs in Birmingham invented the balti. People love to joke that balti means bucket but those who take their baltis seriously insist that this is the name of the dome-shaped wok in which the curry is cooked. Although the dish is said to have originated in Kashmir, the restaurant balti unashamedly makes a virtue out of restaurant short cuts.48 It is made up of marinated and pre-cooked meat, added to a pre-prepared balti sauce, which is a version of Indian restaurant curry sauce made from puréed onions, ginger, garlic, tomatoes, a few ground spices and, most importantly, fresh coriander. Each balti is made distinctive by the way it is assembled. During the first stage of the cooking process a variety of different spices might be fried in oil before the sauce is added. Once the pre-cooked meat has been mixed with the sauce a range of different ingredients – fenugreek, slices of pineapple, lentils – are mixed in to create different baltis.49

  While the food in Indian restaurants took on a life of its own, independent from the food of the Indian subcontinent, the decor projected a romanticised idea of India, teeming with elephants and maharajas. ‘All the restaurants had an exotic look about them,’ commented one of the pioneering restaurateurs, and Haji Shirajul Islam thought his new Karachi restaurant in Marchmont Street ‘one of the nicest restaurants’ at the time: ‘It was all canopies and things.’50 Many of the early restaurants took their lead from Veeraswamy’s. With its high ceilings and beautiful lights from the Maharaja of Mysore’s palace, Edward Palmer’s creation had an air of 1920s elegance. But in 1933 it was sold to another Englishman, who added more Raj touches, including three elephant stools of gold-plated wood. By the 1950s an Indian visitor to Britain thought it created ‘a stereotyped image of India’. ‘A tall Indian wearing a turban stood at the door. The interior was Oriental with embossed wallpaper and ornate brass vases . . . There seemed nothing authentic about the food. I thought it was specially prepared for the British palate. My host explained that the restaurant catered for people like him who felt nostalgic about India from time to time.’51 In many ways images of India had changed little from the days when Sake Dean Mahomed decorated the first Indian restaurant in Britain with specially made cane chairs, prints of Indian scenes and provided a separate hookah-smoking room. The hallmarks of Indian restaurants became red-and-gold flocked wallpaper, heavy carved and inlaid wooden furniture, coloured tablecloths, little Indian statues and tinny Indian music playing in the background. The badly paid waiters served the customers, in true British Raj style, with subservience mixed with an air of subtle defiance.

  Meanwhile, Madhur Jaffrey had arrived in London, to study at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. She was allowed the use of the kitchen at her lodgings but she did not know how to cook. At her home in Delhi ‘food – good food – just appeared miraculously from somewhere at the back of our house’, announced by ‘a bearer, turbaned, sashed and barefooted’. Jaffrey sent imploring letters to her mother asking for help, and her mother obliged by sending detailed recipes and instructions back through the post. Like the nineteenth-century cooks before her, Jaffrey learned to adapt her mother’s recipes to the limitations of the ingredients available in London. She substituted lemon juice for tamarind, parsley for fresh coriander, and eventually became sufficiently accomplished to invite her friends round for her own versions of Mughlai cuisine.52 The fact that Jaffrey had to learn to adapt her recipes to the limitations of British grocers meant that when she began publishing her cookbooks her non-Indian readers found them particularly easy to use. But it was not until she went to New York that she became a cookery writer. In search of a supplementary income to help pay her children’s school fees she began writing food articles. This spiralled into a television cookery series for the BBC. Indian Cooking was broadcast several times in the early 1980s and, through Jaffrey’s books and programmes, the British public learned to cook Indian food at home. Looking back on this series she wrote: ‘The day after I made my Lemony Chicken with green Coriander, I was told that all green coriander in Manchester had sold out. People had more leisure and more money in their pockets. I was cooking real Indian food and the British yearned for it.’53

  Like Madhur Jaffrey, Yousuf Choudhury found it was difficult to buy all the ingredients for Indian food in 1960s Britain. When he arrived in Birmingham from Syhlet in 1957, he used to buy his spices from ‘a chemist off the Coventry Road by Birmingham city football ground’. He and his uncle, and the nine other occupants of their three-bedroom house, retained a preference for freshly killed chickens, as opposed to the long-dead specimens available in British butchers. Live chickens were supplied by a group of dubious traders who hung out along the Varna Road, along with the prostitutes, on Sunday mornings. Thus it was possible to indulge in a little sexual dalliance while procuring dinner. But whoever had to carry the chickens home drew the short straw. ‘When we were on the bus, the chickens used to jump about, so whoever bought the chickens had to walk home.’ Eventually, Noor Ali of Babon-Gaon opened up an Indian grocery store on Wright Street, with others soon following, so that it was possible to buy betel leaf and the favourite Syhleti fruit, satkora, in the Bangladeshi-run grocers.54 As curries became more and more popular with the British, many Indian ingredients – fresh coriander, okra and a range of spices – began appearing in British supermarkets.55

  The earliest convenience foods included curries. Vesta packet foods produced a dehydrated curry meal made with minced beef and the ubiquitous sultanas. A respondent to a survey on eating habits remembered how in 1953, aged fourteen, he ‘took a shine to Vesta packet meals, the first range of such dishes I recall. It must have seemed tres risqué to my mother, brought up on tripe, cow heel, ribs and M[eat] & 2 V[eg] . . . my mother was prepared to indulge my culinary whims, so on high days and holidays it was Vesta curry and rice dishes.’ These curries must have tasted similar to the unappetising dehydrated lightweight meals walkers take with them on long hikes.56 As convenience foods progressed from packets to frozen ready-made meals, curries kept pace. The spices and plentiful onions and garlic of Indian food made the processed meats and frozen vegetables much tastier. Frozen Indian meals were versions of Anglo-Indian pilaus and curries: rice, pieces of chicken and chunks of apple and pineapple flavoured with a sweet yellow curry powder; meat, fruit and sultanas ‘churned together in a bland curry sauce’. Indian food entrepreneurs responded to these terrible concoctions by producing their own. G. K. Noon had come to Britain in 1970 to make sweets for the Indian community in Southall. In 1988 he moved into frozen and chilled ready meals. He now supplies Sainsbury’s and Waitrose, and as a result is the thirty-fifth richest Asian in Britain. Shehzad Husain rang up Marks & Spencer’s to tell them how horrible their Indian ready meals were, only to find herself appointed consultant on their Indian food range, while the Pathak family expanded their pastes and pickle business which had begun on Drummond Street.57 By the end of the 1980s, Indian food was available in a huge variety of forms to every British supermarket shopper. In the unstable boom and bust of Mrs Thatcher’s Britain, curry appealed to a British public which was hungry for stability and tradition. Indian food could not perhaps be classed as traditionally English, but it carried with it echoes of empire and Britain’s period of lost glory, and in 1984 a wave of Raj nostalgia swept over Britain with the screening of The Jewel in the Crown.

  More than any other ethnic food, the British have made curry their own. These days it is considered an integral part of British culture. Going out for an Indian is such a British activity that the Asian comedians in Goodness Gracious Me poked fun at the British with a sketch on going out for an ‘English’. Each year the British spend at least £2 billion in Indian restaurants, while homesick British ex-patriots living in the South of France meet up for curry evenings. Marketing researchers for supermarkets no longer include standard curry paste in the ethnic foods category but treat it as a ‘mainstream British flavour’. In 1997 the British spent £7.7 million on mango chutney.58 When he was at Manchester United, David Beckham
used to celebrate scoring a goal with chicken korma at the city’s Shimla Pinks Indian restaurant.59 Even that profoundly British institution, the pub, serves curry lunches. In 2002, the Observer newspaper made the point that curry is now a ‘British institution’ with a mock cover for a ‘Nation Forward Party’ magazine. A brutish-looking man in leather jacket and Union Jack T-shirt is pictured sitting down to an Indian meal while the slogans around him declaim: ‘Keep Curry British’ and ‘Bhuna! Naan! Pilau! Curry is your birthright.’60

  As the Observer advert hinted, although the British eat vast amounts of curry, they are not always welcoming towards the Asians who make it for them. The lager-loutish tradition of rolling, uproariously drunk, into an Indian restaurant and proving one’s machismo by ordering the hottest vindaloo or phal possible, is one of the disturbing sides of the British relationship with Indian food.61 The consumption of large quantities of curry has not necessarily made the British any less racist. As the food writer Dorothy Hartley wrote in 1956, the British have an unfortunate habit of ‘naturalising’ any foreign dish that enters the culture. The British have thoroughly Anglicised Indian food, first with curry powder, apples and sultanas, and now with chicken tikka sandwiches and curry sauce on chips. In a strange creolisation of Russian and Indian, it is even possible to buy chicken Kiev filled with curry sauce. It can be argued that the prevalence of curry in the British diet is not a sign of a new multicultural sensitivity but rather is symptomatic of British insularity. The creolisation of ethnic foods by the British can be read as a sign that they are only capable of being cosmopolitan in their tastes, as long as they are able to integrate the ethnic dish into their thoroughly British food habits.62

  British attitudes to India have begun to change. The old images of poverty and fading Raj grandeur have been replaced by computer technicians and modern call centres. The wealthy Indian middle class have begun to appear on our cinema screens in films like Monsoon Wedding. Bollywood has become fashionable and these days the British are cast as the bad guys in films such as Lagaan. As a result, the British have begun to look with new eyes at the Indian food which they have been consuming unthinkingly. The fact that Indian restaurant curries would be unrecognisable to many inhabitants of the subcontinent as Indian food, has begun to stimulate interest in authenticity, despite the fact that British restaurant food is simply another variation within a food world characterised by variety. The focus on authenticity fails to acknowledge that the mixture of different culinary styles is the prime characteristic of Indian cookery and that this fusion has produced a plethora of versions of Indian food from Mughlai to Anglo-Indian, from Goan to British Indian.

  Restaurants have responded to the new interest by including ‘authentic’ dishes on their menus, and supermarkets place great emphasis on the ‘authenticity’ of the recipes they use for their ready-prepared meals – Marks & Spencer, for example, point out that all the spices for their new Discover India range are specially imported from India. The change is reflected in the new-style Indian restaurant. ‘Why do Indian restaurants have to be dark and dingy?’ asked Nav Kandola, manager of Five Rivers in Leamington Spa. His restaurant, described at the beginning of the book, is bright and open with chic waiters and a modern menu dotted with ‘authentic’ dishes such as Goan-style mussels. He sees his restaurant as a reflection of the new India, which is a ‘fast, modern place’. Just around the corner, Abdul Hamid has given in to the pressure for change and redecorated his restaurant, Kismet, with pale yellow walls which give the place a light and airy feel. Nevertheless, he regrets the demise of the red-and-gold flocked wallpaper, Indian music and waiters in costume. He is proud of his Syhleti background and felt that it was accurately represented by the atmosphere of exotic glamour. He is saddened by the disappearance of what he sees as traditional India, and can see nothing wrong with providing his customers with an oriental setting in which to eat their meal. For him this is not shallow multiculturalism, but a way of keeping his own culture alive within Britain.

  The recent changes in Indian restaurants reflect the changes in patterns of Asian immigration into Britain. The gaudy but cheerful red-and-gold restaurants run by Syhleti sailors are gradually being replaced by a new-style restaurant, run by the second generation. A more recent wave of professional immigrants have begun to open high-class Indian restaurants where with small portions of beautifully presented food they have endeavoured to place Indian cuisine in the same bracket as cordon bleu French cuisine. They have been successful. Two Indian restaurants in London previously had Michelin stars: Tamarind and Zaika. In Zaika, modern trendy India is combined with a nostalgia for the Raj. The food is served by waiters in chocolate-brown Nehru jackets and the simple but immensely versatile peasant dish, khichari, has been reinvented as ‘Indian risotto’ made with red onions and coriander and topped with crispy prawns.63

  There is a surprising level of hostility across the Indian restaurant divide with some of the rebranders of expensive Indian food dismissing the old-style restaurant owners as ‘Pakis and Banglis who are just junglee peasants with rough habits’. The traditional restaurateurs hit back with the retort that ‘These people are all rubbish. They are half castes, the bastard children who don’t know their own fatherlands, think they know better than us because they speak English. Real food is here and it is cheap.’64

  The Taste of India restaurant in Tonga’s capital, Nuku’alofa

  10

  Curry Travels the World

  WHEN INDIANS TRAVEL they take their food culture with them. Syhletis returning to Britain after a visit to Bangladesh carry back suitcases stuffed with jars of chutney, pickled mangoes and dried punti fish.1 Indian merchants in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century spice trade took Gujarati and south Indian food to Malaysia. There, Indian spice mixtures were leavened with star anise which Chinese traders had brought with them to the peninsula. This combined well with the Malaysian flavouring of lemon grass and coconut milk as a base for sauces. From Malaysia, south Indians travelled to the spice islands of Indonesia where curries are now made with Sumatran spices such as kaffir leaves and galangal.2 But Indian food has been spread around the globe most effectively by indentured labourers.

  In 1836, the Liverpool merchant John Gladstone (father of the Prime Minister William) suggested that the shortfall of labour predicted by West Indian sugar planters, as a result of the abolition of slavery, might be made up by Indian labourers. Under the resulting system of virtual slavery, poverty-stricken (usually Hindu) peasants entered into binding contracts under which they agreed to give their labour for either five or seven years. In return they were given housing, food, medicine, clothing, minimal wages and a free passage to the country where they were to work.3 The first shipment of indentured labourers sailed for Demerara in 1838, and by the time the Indian National Congress successfully campaigned to bring the system to an end in 1919, 1.5 million had left India and, at the most, only one-third had returned home.4 Indentured labour took Indians and their food culture around the globe to Mauritius from 1843, British Guyana, Trinidad and Jamaica from 1845, South Africa and Fiji from the 1870s. All these countries now demonstrate a strong Indian influence in their cookery.

  The majority of indentured labourers lost all contact with their home country from the moment they climbed on board the ship. On the voyage many of the caste restrictions which shaped their social lives broke down. It was impossible to eat in their caste groups, as everyone was served their food out of the same pot and water was distributed to all from the same container irrespective of caste or religion. Once the principle preventing inter-dining between men of different castes and communities had broken down on the ship, it was not reinstated in the new country. Nevertheless, Indian food remained central to their sense of identity.

  This is still the case in Fiji. Indo-Fijians with northern and southern Indian roots express their sense of difference from each other through comments about eating habits. Thus Indo-Fijians originally from northern India refer to their co
mpatriots with a south Indian heritage as kata panis (sour waters). This is a mocking reference to the southerners’ love of tamarind as a souring agent in their food. In retaliation, the southerners refer to the northerners as kuri. This implies weakness and stinginess. Here it refers to the lack of spices in northern food compared to southern sauces which are thick with whole spices. The indentured labourers were often reluctant to eat the food of their new countries and continued to cook the dishes familiar from home. In Guyana and Trinidad, the Indian community have preserved the cooking traditions of their home region Uttar Pradesh, producing dark curries coloured by pre-roasted spices. In Malaysia, where many of the labourers on the rubber plantations were Tamil, the Indians eat the sambars and lentil preparations which characterise south Indian food.5 Even today, Indo-Fijians make few concessions to their new culinary environment. They occasionally buy the Fijian vegetables, breadfruit or taro, but usually only if there is a shortage of potatoes. Ironically, many of the ingredients such as potatoes, tomatoes and chillies, which are now seen as Indian ingredients by Indian emigrants, are in fact alien foodstuffs introduced to the South Asian subcontinent from the New World by Europeans.