She recognised the pleasure curry house food gave to others, but simply did not think of it – or taste it – as Indian.Īs a teenager, I started cooking from Madhur Jaffrey’s books and saw with a jolt that, for Indian cooks, hearing British people declaring they loved curry could come across as a crass postcolonial misrepresentation. It wasn’t like her mother’s delicately spiced vegetarian food or the coconut-rich dishes her father had grown up with in Kerala. My best friend at secondary school came from a Gujarati-Keralan family and told me that the food of curry houses wasn’t recognisable to her. I’ve never felt quite the same about the charms of curry house curry since I first heard that these ‘Indian’ curries were created by Bangladeshi curry house owners with British palates in mind. Our mother usually chose a sickly sweet ochre-coloured korma, now said to be the most popular curry in Britain (having overtaken chicken tikka masala). We would watch in wonder as our father attempted to survive a vindaloo, his face turning pinker from a pain that no amount of water could quell. The biryani was garnished with incredibly neat slices of hard-boiled egg and tomato. For a treat our family would go to Uddin’s Manzil Tandoori Restaurant on Walton Street in Oxford (long since closed down), where my sister and I would share a mushroom biryani which came with a mixed vegetable curry in a delicious oily red sauce that burned our tongues, but only slightly. ‘I can’t touch the Indian fruits or the fish which they say is so delicious,’ Robinson wrote to her sister Fanny, ‘and as to the curries it makes me sick to think of them.’Īs a child in the early 1980s, I believed that curry was synonymous with Indian food and that Indian food was synonymous with curry, or at least, with curry and rice and poppadoms and masses of sugary mango chutney and what we called naan bread (not realising it was a tautology since naan means ‘bread’). Her problem was that the curries in India weren’t like the unsubtle curry-powder-laced stews she knew from home (in ‘A Poem to Curry’, written in 1846, Thackeray describes one made from three pounds of veal, three tablespoons of curry powder and half a pound of Epping butter). As a third-generation Anglo-Indian, she was familiar with spicy food. She was 29, the eldest child of a Gloucestershire rector, and had gone to India as the wife of a British army officer, her cousin. Adjective correct, desirable, excellent, gratifying, happy, ideal, inadequate, insufficient, rewarding, satisfied, sick, suitable, welcome.‘G ive me an English one!’ Matty Robinson said after tasting her first Indian curries in Bombay in 1858.Adjective accurate, agreeable, beneficial, best, cogent, comfortable, commendable, compelling, competent, complete, comprehensive, conclusive, contented, convincing, credible, decent, disappointing, effective, efficient, encouraging, favourable, felicitous, fitting, fruitful, gratified, healthy, idealistic, meaningful, nice, okay, optimal, optimum, pathological, perfect, persuasive, pertinent, pleasant, proper, reasonable, reassuring, right, sensible, smooth, tolerable, unacceptable, undesirable, valid, workable, worthwhile, Fulfilling, well-established.
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