Full transcript
0:00‘Going for an Indian’ or ‘having a curry’
0:02is almost as stereotypically British as roast dinners or fish and chips.
0:06There are around 12,000 curry houses in Britain.
0:09The word came from the Tamil ‘kari’, which meant a spiced sauce.
0:13But gradually the term was adapted and used as a generic term
0:15for any stew-like food from the Indian subcontinent -
0:19rather ignoring such subtleties as,
0:20regional differences and completely different flavours,
0:23textures, cooking methods and ingredients.
0:25The first definite mention of ‘curry’ in English is in 1598.
0:29But the first recipe for curry published in Britain
0:31wasn’t until 1747,
0:33by which time Brits, long-time traders with India,
0:36were slowly taking over the country.
0:38Thousands of British men and women spent time in India.
0:40They had Indian cooks and servants,
0:42and while some tried to maintain Western eating habits,
0:44most quickly embraced the tastes of their new home.
0:47When they returned to Britain,
0:48they brought their new love of Indian food back with them.
0:51Those who had lived in India
0:52knew very well that not all Indian dishes were curry,
0:54and when the first,
0:55albeit short-lived Indian restaurant in Britain
0:57opened in London in 1810,
0:59its menu contained khichdi, chutnee and pulao...
1:02dishes later known by the anglicised names, kedgeree, chutney and pilaf.
1:06Manuscript books, kept by those in the know,
1:08also differentiated between dishes.
1:10But they were very much a minority, and in Britain,
1:12curry became a catch-all term for almost anything with Indian spices.
1:16Slowly certain dishes, especially chicken curry -
1:19which used an elderly fowl, which had stopped laying eggs -
1:21entered the mainstream repertoire.
1:23Ready-made curry powders were widely sold.
1:26British palates were not used to Indian spices,
1:28and the early recipes are more like gently flavoured meaty stews,
1:31laden with turmeric, ginger and galangale, with cayenne for a hit.
1:35By the 19th Century,
1:36curry was in every cookbook, mainly as a leftover dish.
1:39The Anglo-Indian cuisine of this era was a hybrid,
1:42using pickled cucumbers to replace mango, apple instead of tamarind,
1:45and ready-made spice blends galore.
1:47It was great, but had very little in common with its Eastern roots.
1:51Queen Victoria took a different approach,
1:52regularly eating ‘Indian dishes’
1:54prepared by the cook to her Indian attendants,
1:56who’d joined the royal staff at her Golden Jubilee in 1887.
2:00There were a few eating houses run by Indians,
2:02mainly for other Indians, in port towns,
2:05but it took until the 1920s for high profile restaurants to open,
2:08catering for a British market.
2:10By 1946 there were around 20 Indian restaurants in London.
2:14Boomtime for curry came after the Second World War,
2:16when the partition of India brought migrants
2:18from Punjab and Sylhet to Britain.
2:20In the 1970s,
2:21civil war in Bangladesh saw many Bangladeshis flee to Britain,
2:24and even today many apparently generic Indian restaurants
2:27are really Bangladeshi.
2:28Curry, in its 1970s form, was cheap and cheerful,
2:31adapted for British tastes.
2:33In 2001 the then foreign secretary, Robin Cook
2:36declared boldly that Britain’s national dish was chicken tikka masala…
2:39a classic example of an Indian dish - buttered chicken -
2:43meeting British tastes,
2:44in this case with the addition of cream and, allegedly,
2:47cream of tomato soup.
2:49In the last decade or so,
2:50the British relationship to Indian food has changed.
2:52Most of us have grown out of wanting something so hot
2:55it’ll hospitalise us.
2:56Leading Indian chefs are teaching us
2:58that there is so much more to Indian food
3:00than the comforting predictability of the average restaurant menu.
3:03Maybe after 250 years, we’ve simply come full circle.