Curry, the world conqueror

Lizzie Collingham's latest book looks at the origins and history of curry, which, from its humble beginnings in India, has become one of the most popular and internationalised foods on the planet. William Grimes digs in

Curry: A Tale of Crooks and Conquerors

by Lizzie Collingham. Vintage, €24

Acouple of years ago, as a spoof, a London newspaper designed the cover for an ultranationalist magazine. It showed a lout in a leather jacket and Union Jack T-shirt sitting down to an Indian meal, surrounded by the slogans "Keep Curry British!" and "Bhuna! Nan! Pilau! Curry is your birthright!"

The lout may be right, as Lizzie Collingham tells it in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, her fascinating if digressive inquiry into curry and how it grew. Curry, which originated in India, has become one of the most internationalised foods on the planet, right up there with pizza. Karee raisu (curry rice) is one of Japan's most popular foods. Samoans make a Polynesian curry using canned fish and corned beef. In New York, several restaurants on the stretch of Lexington Avenue known jokingly as Curry Hill do a brisk business selling kosher curries. The British, having mastered the art of curry and chips, have moved along to culinary innovations like chicken Kiev filled with curry sauce.

Lots of diners would balk at curried chicken Kiev, but not Collingham. She is a good postmodernist who scoffs at the idea of authenticity when it comes to food. One of her goals, in tracing the evolution of curry and the global spread of Indian cuisine, is to pull the rug out from under the idea that India, or any other nation, ever had a cuisine that was not constantly in the process of assimilation and revision. The very dishes, flavors and food practices that we think of as timelessly, quintessentially Indian turn out to be, as often as not, foreign imports or newfangled inventions. That includes chilli peppers and tea.

What could be more Indian than chillies? Yet before the Portuguese arrived at the beginning of the 15th century, Indians had never seen or tasted a chilli, a New World spice that Columbus called "pepper of the Indies". The heat in Indian dishes came from a red pepper known as long pepper or from the black pepper familiar in the West.

In addition to chillies, the Portuguese brought carne de vinho e alhos, or pork cooked slowly in wine vinegar and garlic. Local cooks in Goa, Portugal's trading headquarters, reinterpreted the dish. They fashioned an ersatz vinegar from tamarind, and threw in lots of spices, especially chillis. Thus vindaloo, a corruption of vinho e alhos, was born, and with it a new traditional Indian food.

Collingham, the author of Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj, ranges far and wide. Her subject is much larger, in fact, than curry. She traces the evolution of Indian cuisine, its often bizarre cultural exchanges with the invading British and its eventual export to the world outside. She roams geographically from the northwest frontier to the shores of Sri Lanka, and historically from the culinary innovations of the Mughals in the 15th century to the triumph of chicken tikka masala, which Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, hailed as the new British national dish in 2001. Along the way, she sometimes loses the narrative thread, but the byways and even the dead ends tend to be intriguing.

Curry is not, strictly speaking, Indian at all. It is a British invention. From the Portuguese, the early British traders learned to apply the word "caril", or "carree", incorrectly, to sauces made from butter, crushed nuts, spices and fruits that were then poured over rice. (In various South Indian languages, "karil" or "kari" referred to spices for seasoning or to dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat.) Eventually, the word evolved into a catchall. "Curry became not just a term that the British used to describe an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts," Collingham writes, "but a dish in its own right, created for the British in India".

With the Raj, Curry really hits its stride. Collingham skillfully weaves her way through the complex cultural transactions that yielded a specialised Anglo-Indian cuisine based, in large part, on mutual misunderstanding. The English were used to starting a meal with soup. The Indians do not divide meals into courses, and have no soup. Liquids are poured over rice. Nevertheless, eager to please, Indian cooks in Madras used the most souplike dish ready to hand, a peppery tamarind broth called molo tunny, and jazzed it up with rice, vegetable and meat. This cultural mishmash became an Anglo-Indian classic, mulligatawny soup. Many others followed.

The British rarely stayed put in India, and as they moved from city to city they carried their hybrid foods with them. Authentic or not, the Anglo-Indian repertory was "the first truly pan-Indian cuisine, in that it absorbed techniques and ingredients from every Indian region and was eaten throughout the entire length and breadth of the subcontinent," Ms. Collingham writes. In their clueless search for palatable food, the British managed to invent curry powder, Worcestershire sauce and ketchup (made from mushrooms until tomatoes became popular in the 19th century). Most impressively, they also turned India, where scarcely a cup of tea was drunk before 1900, into a nation of avid tea drinkers.

As Indians and their curries made their way from the West Indies to South Africa to the Pacific Islands, the culinary give-and-take continued. Ms Collingham turns up all sorts of cultural odds and ends, like the "Mexican-Hindu" cuisine that appeared in California in the early 20th century when Punjabi laborers integrated jalapeño peppers and tortillas into their native dishes. She also explains how Indian carry-out and curry and chips became working-class British, and why almost all Indian restaurants in Britain and the United States are Bangladeshi. Are they authentic? Don't ask.

WILLIAM GRIMES

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