Anglo-Indian cuisine

Anglo-Indian cuisine is the cuisine that developed during the British Raj in India. The cuisine introduced dishes such as curry, chutney, kedgeree, mulligatawny and pish pash to English palates.

Anglo-Indian cuisine was documented in detail by the English colonel Arthur Robert Kenney-Herbert, writing as "Wyvern" in 1885 to advise the British Raj's memsahibs what to instruct their Indian cooks to make. Many of its usages are described in the "wonderful" 1886 Anglo-Indian dictionary, Hobson-Jobson. More recently, the cuisine has been analysed by Jennifer Brennan in 1990 and David Burton in 1993.

History

Anglo-Indian cooks created what they called curry by selecting elements of Indian dishes from all over British India. Lizzie Collingham describes their taste as "eclectic", "pan-Indian", "lacking sophistication", embodying a "passion for garnishes", and forming a "coherent repertoire"; but it was eaten only by the British. Among their creations were Curry powder, Kedgeree, Madras curry, and Mulligatawny curry soup, accompanied by Bombay duck, chutneys, pickles, and poppadoms.

During the British rule in India, cooks began adapting Indian dishes for British palates and creating Anglo-Indian cuisine, with dishes such as kedgeree (1790) and mulligatawny soup (1791). The first Indian restaurant in England, the Hindoostane Coffee House, opened in 1809 in London; as described in The Epicure's Almanack in 1815, "All the dishes were dressed with curry powder, rice, Cayenne, and the best spices of Arabia. A room was set apart for smoking hookahs with oriental herbs". Indian food was cooked at home from a similar date as cookbooks of the time, including the 1758 edition of Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery, attest.

The British East India Company arrived in India in 1600, developing into a large and established organisation. By 1760, men were returning home from India with money and a taste for Indian food. In 1784, a listing in the Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser promoted ready-mix curry powder to be used in Indian-style dishes. While no dish called "curry" existed in India in the 18th and 19th centuries, Anglo-Indians likely coined the term, derived from the Tamil word "kari" meaning a spiced sauce poured over rice, to denote any Indian dish. Storytelling may have allowed family members at home to learn about Indian food.

Hannah Glasse's receipt To make a Currey the Indian Way, on page 101 of the 1758 edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy

Many cookbooks including Indian-style dishes were written and published by British women in the late 18th century, such as Hannah Glasse's 1758 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, which included the recipe "To make a Currey the Indian Way".

As Indian cuisine grew in popularity in Britain, the desire for authentic Indian delicacies grew. In March 1811, the Hindoostane Coffee House opened in Portman Square offering Indian ambience and curries as well as hookah smoking rooms. The founder, Sake Dean Mohomed, stated that the ingredients for the curries as well as the herbs for smoking were authentically Indian.

Dishes

Further information: English cuisine § Indian and Anglo-Indian cuisine, and List of chutneys

Well-known Anglo-Indian dishes include chutneys, salted beef tongue, kedgeree, ball curry, fish rissoles, and mulligatawny soup. Chutney, one of the few Indian dishes that has had a lasting influence on English cuisine according to the Oxford Companion to Food, is a cooked and sweetened condiment of fruit, nuts or vegetables. It borrows from a tradition of jam making where an equal amount of sour fruit and refined sugar reacts with the pectin in the fruit such as sour apples or rhubarb, the sour note being provided by vinegar. Major Grey's Chutney is typical.

Pish pash was defined by Hobson-Jobson as "a slop of rice-soup with small pieces of meat in it, much used in the Anglo-Indian nursery". The term was first recorded by Augustus Prinsep in the mid 19th century. The name comes from the Persian pash-pash, from pashidan, to break. A version of the dish is given in The Cookery Book of Lady Clark of Tillypronie of 1909.

Restaurants

Further information: English cuisine § Indian and Anglo-Indian cuisine

Some early restaurants in England, such as the Hindoostane Coffee House on George Street, London, which opened in 1810, served Anglo-Indian food. Many Indian restaurants, however, have reverted to the standard mix-and-match Indian dishes that are better known to the British public.

Sources

• Collingham, Lizzie (2007). Curry: A tale of cooks and conquerors. Chapter 1: Chicken Tikka Masala: The Quest for an Authentic Indian Meal, Chapter 6: Curry Powder: Bringing India to Britain: Oxford University press. p. 129.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
• Metcalf, Barbara (2014). A Concise History of Modern India. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9781139207805. ISBN 9781139207805.

Further reading

• Patricia Brown (24 February 1998). Anglo-Indian Food and Custom. Penguin Books India. ISBN 0-14-027137-6.
• Henrietta Hervey (2006) [1895]. A Curry Book (Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home). Ludlow: Excellent Press. ISBN 978-1-900318-33-4.
• Pat Chapman (1997). Taste of the Raj. London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 0-340-68035-0.

External links

• "Food Stories" Archived 10 April 2021 at the Wayback Machine — Explore a century of revolutionary change in UK food culture on the British Library's Food Stories website
• "How Britain got the hots for curry". BBC News Magazine. 26 November 2009. Retrieved 15 August 2014.
• "Fears for the decline of Anglo-Indian cooking". BBC News Online. 7 February 2011. Retrieved 15 August 2014.
• "Indian Food" — Authentic Indian Cuisine in the UK.

• "Best Indian Restaurant in London" — Have a look to the best Indian food restaurants in London to the History_of_Indian_cuisine's Holy Cow website