The rich and delectable story of curry (and how it travelled)
Normally, people discover mushroom of the heady kind in Amsterdam, but I found my bliss in the Surinamese Indian meals I would order to my hotel room from Roopram Roti, which has quite a committed following in the capital of the Netherlands.
As I would tear my roti, which was half way between a roomali roti and a parantha, and dig into the accompanying watery chicken curry, sautéed snake beans and a spicy potato mash — the cuisine introduced by Indian indentured labourers into the Dutch colony after slavery was abolished by Britain and Spain in 1833 — I was struck by the global footprint of what the world calls "curry".
It is this "counter-colonial" empire of the "curry", a term that doyenne of Indian cookbook writers, Madhur Jaffrey, had rubbished in her ground-breaking work, An Invitation to Indian Cookery (1974), as being “as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s”, that Colleen Taylor Sen, without doubt the foremost chronicler today of Indian food history, maps out in her small yet information-loaded book, Curry: A Global History, reprinted for Indian market by Speaking Tiger.
Curry has had an incredible journey since the 17th-century Italian composer and world traveller Pietro Della Vale used the term caril/caree to describe broths “made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian nuts... and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger... besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments... poured in good quantity... upon boiled rice”, to the age of Hannh Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747), the first British cookbook to contain a curry recipe, and William Thackeray’s curry-loving nabob, Josiah Sedley, in Vanity Fair a century later, to its many manifestations, from the South African bunny chow to the Japanese kare raisu (curry rice), across the world.
It is this global expansion that Sen records in her book peppered with anecdotes and colourful personalities, such as "Prince" Ranji Smile, the first of the celebrity "bad boy" chefs who wowed New York’s fashionable society at the dawn of the 1900s with his invented genealogy (he claimed to be an Indian prince who was a Cambridge University graduate and a personal friend of Edward VII) and made, as Harper’s Bazaar noted breathlessly, "Women Go Wild Over Him."
She moves on to equally delicious nuggets, such as the one about the "Mexican Hindu" cuisine born out of marriages between Punjabi Sikh railroad workers and Mexican women in California’s Sacramento Valley. The reference to "Hindus Pizza" — a "Mexican Hindu" creation — reminded me of the varieties of fusion pizzas with a curry twist, from Hemant Oberoi’s nanzza (pizza on a naan base with Indian toppings) to the more recent attempts at indigenisation by McDonald’s, Domino’s and Pizza Hut.
Stories such as these abound in the book. One is about the Australian 19th-century novelist Marcus Clarke, who made an impassioned plea for curry to be made a national dish. The story of curry’s indigenisation in Trinidad and Tobago, 40 per cent of whose population is of Indian origin, is riveting because it says a lot about how Indian indentured labourers innovated to hold on to their food culture even when they were "seven seas" away.
In this Caribbean island, for instance, they substituted coriander with the local herb, shadow beni, which they called bandhaniya. In Guyana, another island dominated by people of Indian origin, they invented combinations such as chicken and squash, duck and potato, mutton and aubergine, green beans and dried fish.
The only story I missed reading was of the Indian revolutionary (and fugitive in Japan) Rash Behari Bose’s second career as the man behind the ever-popular chicken curry of Nakamuraya, the Tokyo restaurant that opened in 1927.
After breezing through Sen’s delectable little book, one is tempted to hazard a theory: The empire of the "curry" has outlasted the Portuguese, who brought chillies from South America to India, and the British, who took the "curry" wherever they went, from London to Tokyo to Sydney.
It was the first global empire to be born out of the death throes of colonialism.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)