Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors by Elizabeth M. Collingham

Author:Elizabeth M. Collingham [Collingham, Elizabeth M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: General, Social Science, History, Asia, Cooking, Agriculture & Food, Regional & Ethnic, Specific Ingredients, India & South Asia, East Indians
ISBN: 9780099437864
Publisher: Vintage Books
Published: 2006-07-25T06:00:00+00:00

Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors

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 that one might have expected, but for cheese 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 that 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 that 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 orientalized 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.

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