On curries, curry powder, imperialism, and 19th century British cookbooks, plus a recipe for khichdi.
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“Where is imperialism? Look at your plates when you eat.” Thomas Sankara, the president of Burkina Faso (formerly the Republic of Upper Volta), spoke these words at the First National Conference of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution in 1986. Although Sankara, a communist revolutionary leader, was referring to food aid to his country from western nations – the rest of the quote is “the imported rice, maize, and millet; that is imperialism – the sentiment applies to the dinner tables of the colonizers and the colonized the world over.
I first encountered this quote, somewhat removed from its context, in Lizzy Collingham’s The Taste of Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World (in the UK, the book’s title is The Hungry Empire). I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Food historians have long known, of course, that food and imperialism, and food and conquest have always gone hand in hand. Collingham has written about this before in Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. Rachel Laudan’s Cuisine and Empire: Cooking in World History also does a stellar job in describing the relationship between cuisine and conquest. There are, of course, many more works on this matter. But there was something about this quote, something that I can’t quite put my finger on, that truly spoke to me. Perhaps it is that Sankara was not telling us WHAT imperialism is, but WHERE it is, and the answer is not a geographical place but a tangible object that is a site of daily life.
With this quote in mind, and inspired by the British history I had been reading in Taste of Empire, I set out to find out how, and how much, that imperialism was reflected in 19th century British cookbooks. To be sure, by the 19th century British people in the British Isles had long enjoyed the fruits of empire. When they drank tea, they enjoyed the fruits of the empire. When they stirred sugar into the tea, they enjoyed the fruits of empire. Likewise, when they sat down to a curry, regardless of how anglicized it was, they enjoyed the fruits of empire. But, as Troy Bickman posits in “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery, and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” it is unclear how consumers understood their relationship to the foods on their plate “or to the imperial machinery” that made it possible.
In “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England,” Susan Zlotnick makes a claim that does define British women’s relationship to the empire through food, especially in the years following the overthrowing of the Mughal Empire and the establishment of the British Raj in 1858. Zlotnick argues that while the government attempted to anglicize the empire – India more specifically – through educational and legal reforms, British women did the same by incorporating Indian food, where the food essentially stood in for the Indian subcontinent, into their diets.[1] In the process, they made Indian food an integral part of the British diet and of British culture.
In essence, just like Amelia Simmons was in the late 18th century domesticating British food and making it American in American Cookery, British women were absorbing the foods of the empire into the commonplace British dinner repertoire. This was a process that mimicked the absorption of the Indian subcontinent into the British Empire. Or their resources, anyway. Time and time again we see that cookbooks, whether printed or manuscript, are a reflection of the politics, culture, and society at large of their time.
Although the British Raj wasn’t established until 1858 when the crown took official control of governing India, Britain had long been exploiting and governing the Indian subcontinent through the East India Company. The company, established in 1600, had gained administrative control of India, dominating its trade. As such, the British back in Britain had access to knowledge and products from the far reaches of the empire. And so, from the mid 18th century, British cookbooks began to reflect those imperial ties more and more. Recipes for curries (often spelled currey), for dishes in the “Indian manner” or “East Indian manner,” the “India way,” etc., appear in Hannah Glasse’s and Mrs. Frazer’s books, published in 1747 and 1791 respectively. Hanna Glasse’s book is the first book to be known to have recipes for curry, which resemble very little anything eaten in India at the time. This is all in addition to ingredients like spices from the Indian subcontinent appearing in otherwise unmarked recipes that reflect the fruits of the empire.
By the middle of the 19th century curries were, according to Modern Domestic Cookery, 1851, “completely naturalized” to Britain. So much so, the author – A Lady – says, that “few dinners are thought complete unless there is one [curry] at the table.” And a crucial part of making a successful curry was procuring good curry powder. The book goes on to give us seven different recipes for curry powder, including regional varieties like Delhi curry powder, Madras curry powder, and Bengal curry powder. There is also a recipe for curry powder attributed to Sir Henry Pottinger, a British colonist who traveled around the subcontinent disguised as a Muslim merchant and later held the position of Resident Administrator in Sindh (modern-day Pakistan), and Hyderabad, as well as the governorship of Madras, both in modern-day India. Another book, The Practical Cook, English and Foreign, 1845, by Joseph Bregion and Anne Miller, gives us five different recipes for curry powder, and countless other books give us many more.
The importance of curry powder, a mix of spices created in India specifically for the British and intended to simulate the flavors of Indian food, permeates cookbooks of the mid-nineteenth century. Curry powder recipes had already been present in manuscript recipe books since the late 18th century, and curry powder had been commercially available since around the same time. Yet, cookbooks insisted on making the, well, making, of curry powder a domestic affair.
Despite the attachment to curry powder, however, not all who promoted its use did so in a positive manner, even if they praised it. In the 1851 cookbook The Modern Housewife, or Ménagère, Alexis Soyer gives us a much less kind – and much more classist and even xenophobic – use for curry powder.
“Curry powder is another of those Indian condiments which have latterly come so much into use, and it is only to be regretted that it is not cheaper than it is, so as to allow it to be more generally used, as it is one of those stimulating condiments which would be invaluable to the poor; its use would prevent the habit of taking other stimulants which produce intoxication.”
This quote tells us two things. First, curry powder was probably expensive enough that it was out of the reach of the working class or the working poor, which explains to some degree why the emphasis on making your own in other cookbooks. Second, Soyer, at least, didn’t have a very high opinion of curry powder, which he saw fit best for the poor. In an era when there was a clear distinction between what poor people and rich people ate, and when anything consumed by the poor was seen as undesirable, this sentiment mattered.
But Soyer, a French chef who made his career mostly in England, was not the only one who believed that consuming curry, or curry powder, deterred people from indulging in stimulants and intoxicants. Years later, in 1889, John Loudoun Shand wrote in the introduction to the third edition of The Curry Cook’s Assistant, published in London by Daniel Santiagoe, that “all human nature requires to be occasionally stimulated, and a mild Curry acts up on the torpid liver, reacts upon the digestive organs, and provides the necessary stimulant without injurious consequences. It is a remarkable fact that nearly all Curry-eating nations are abstainers from strong drink.” That this was mere correlation didn’t even seem like a possibility in his mind. Daniel Santiagoe was a Ceylon native (modern-day Sri Lanka) who had been taken to England and Scotland to cook at great houses.
Others, trying to sell their own products, decried the use of curry powder altogether as inauthentic. The November 1, 1829 issue of Bell’s Life in London and Sporting Chronicle contains an ad for “Cooke’s curry and Madras mulligatawny pastes.” As a way to assert the superiority of the product, the ad claims that that “Old Curry Powders” did not contain any of the ingredients the native cooks in India actually used. Therefore, people could not reasonably expect that they could make curries and mulligatawnies as good as those containing the real ingredients … and of course, their pastes did. The ad also claims that the pastes, being so great and authentic, and making curries equal to those of India, had been readily accepted by East Indians in London. In one fell swoop, this ad tries to expose curry powder as a ruse and tokenizes Indians in Britain in an attempt to legitimize the curry pastes.
If the author of Modern Domestic Cookery saw curries as an ingrained staple of the British table, then The Practical Cook saw it as foreign, or at least as “other.” The Practical Cook is an Anglo-French fusion cookbook, with some other cuisines thrown in for kicks. The authors are not especially fond most of the cuisines they include – French and English aside – going as far as saying that they are mostly without merit. Although they don’t explain why they include most of them, they make an exception for the section titled “Indian and Anglo-Indian Cookery”:
“As there is scarcely an English family among the higher and middle classes, who does not number among its members a retired military or civil servant of the East India Company, or a retired naval officer or commercial man, it has been thought advisable to introduce a considerable chapter on Anglo-Indian cookery.”
In no uncertain words, this chapter in the book exists by mere virtue of the existence of the British Empire. The book, then, brings the empire to the British table as a comfort of sorts for those who have been directly involved in the imperial project.
Bregion and Miller go on to claim that this chapter in The Practical Cook was, as far as they knew, “the most complete system of Indian cookery ever presented in a connected form.” What they mean, of course, is Indian cookery adapted for and by the British rather than authentically Indian food. Or, more accurately, rather than the food the people of India ate themselves. Even so, it is clear from the text that the authors do not think this is British food. That curries, for them, have not been “naturalized” in British culture as Modern Domestic Cookery’s author claims. As such, it is its own chapter.
There is one crucial way in which imperialism is reflected in these cookbooks of the 19th century with recipes for Indian food, or what the authors believe is Indian food. With some exceptions, a vast number of the recipes use beef or pork, meats that would be not just questionable but insulting to the two large majorities in the Indian subcontinent: Hindus and Muslims respectively. For Hindus, cows are sacred and therefore not eaten. Many Hindus were – and are – also vegetarian so even curries with chicken, fowl, mutton, seafood, etc. was objectionable. For Muslims, who follow Halal dietary restrictions, eating pork is haram, or forbidden. For comparison the 17th-century Mughal cookbook Nuskha-e-Shahjahani, translated by Salma Yusuf-Husain as The Mughal Feast, has no recipes with pork or beef. Instead, it calls for lamb, goat, fish, chicken, and goose. The Mughals were Muslim who ruled over a majority Hindu population. To this day, beef is not very commonly eaten in Pakistan, a Muslim-majority area of the subcontinent, and pork is not very common in India, with a Hindu-majority, even though Muslims can eat beef and (non-vegetarian) Hindus can eat pork.
Thus, while British cookbook writers, and by extension British cooks, were making an effort to incorporate the foods of the empire into the British diet, it was done in a way that went counter to the most core beliefs of the people from which they were borrowed, nay, stolen. To be sure, Hindus ate pork and Muslims ate beef, but the recipes within these cookbooks do not differentiate between recipes adapted from Muslim traditions versus Hindu traditions. This is the same way British people in India ate; the practice of putting pork and beef in food claimed to be Indian without regard for religious dietary conventions or provenance and caring only about English taste was not created wholesale by cookbook writers.
On this point, at least, Bregion and Miller of The Practical Cook deserve some commendation. Unlike other cookbook authors who made no distinction between the two, they do acknowledge that Indian and Anglo-Indian cuisines were different. This, too, became a problem in the context of imperialism. Once the British appropriated Indian cuisine, adapted it for their own taste, and made it into something they deemed superior to the real deal, they sought to export their version of Indian cuisine back to the people of the subcontinent. Curry, the English concoction and proxy for all Anglo-Indian food, became “commodified and returned to India as the gift of the ‘civilizer,’” as Zlotnick explains. Rather than believing they had stolen Indian cuisine and transformed it almost beyond recognition, the British believed they had improved it and the improved version was their gift to the colonized people of the subcontinent.
Around the middle of the 19th century, just as the recipes, chapters, and even entire books on Indian cookery began to proliferate in British publishing, see, for example, Indian Cookery, 1861, by Richard Terry, the chef of the Oriental Club in London, a similar process was taking place back in India. Books like Indian Domestic Economy and Receipt Book, already on the fifth edition by 1860 and published in Madras, emphasized a new way of cooking for Anglo-Indians. That is, English people residing and making a life in India. More accurately, the recipes were meant to be passed on to Indian servants in Anglo-Indian households so they could make the anglicized versions of the foods the native cooks had been eating their whole lives. Indian Domestic Economy, for instance, has a chapter on pickles and chutneys, and one titled “Oriental cookery” meaning Indian. The latter contains a variety of curries, pilau, and other dishes from the subcontinent.
In Calcutta in 1880, “A Thirty-Five Years’ Resident,” of India, British no doubt, published a book titled The Indian Cookery Book with the same aim as Indian Domestic Cookery. The difference, however is that in the former the entirety of the book is Indian and Anglo-Indian food, with some English and French food recipes, as well as some medicinal recipes, thrown in. This book also includes Luso-Indian recipes like vindaloo, which also represent the transformation of a local cuisine by colonizers and its introduction back into the cuisine of the colonized. The book also makes some differentiation between regions, with sections for “Hindoostanee,” curries and Malay curries.
This action of introducing anglicized versions of local dishes into the Indian subcontinent as better and improved versions of local foods, brings the story full circle to Thomas Sankara’s question about where imperialism is and his answer, “look at your plates when you eat.” Imperialism was on the British plate, in British cookbooks, and in British culture. But the same imperialism was on the plates of people of the Indian subcontinent and the diaspora, whose varied cuisines had been stolen, changed, commodified, and then returned to them by the colonizers under the guise of benevolence and progress.
[1] It is necessary to mention that at the time “India” was not modern India, but rather encompassed most of modern-day India plus Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and even parts of Burma. This was what encompassed the British Raj.