“To Make a Curry the India Way”: Tracking the Meaning of Curry Across Eighteenth-Century Communities

Abstract

With attention to the cultural mobility of local and global foodstuffs, this study examines the movement of curry as a product of England's colonization of India. The concept of a curry was developed by the British East India Company while stationed in India. Members of the EIC would describe any saucy Indian dish as a “curry,” and when these men returned to England, they brought back their desire for Indian food. The movement of curry helped to shape its definition as a colonial product of India incorporated into English cuisine. By tracking curry and curry powder from its inception as an East India Company staple to the cookbooks and kitchens of eighteenth century Britain, this study shows how the distinct locality of curry changed its meaning over time.

Notes

1. Alan Davidson, “Curry,” The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 235.

2. Curry has received a surprising amount of critical attention, and it has been addressed in largely two different ways: the debate over whether curry is an English or Indian foodstuff, and the use of curry as an example for larger arguments about imperialism and nationalism. Perhaps the two most influential treatments of curry are Lizzie Collingham's book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006) and Susan Zlotnick's essay “Domesticating Imperialism: Curry and Cookbooks in Victorian England” (Frontiers 16.2/3, 1996: 51–68). While both authors have presented sound and—in the case of Collingham's Curry—almost exhaustive studies, they approach curry from different angles. Collingham more or less adheres to the is-curry-English-or-Indian debate, and she tells the story of curry (and other Indian, Anglo-Indian, and British foods) from a wholly historical perspective. Zlotnick embraces the second scenario, situating her argument of curry in women's domestic identity. She shows through the example of curry how Victorian women did the domesticating work of the Empire. Neither author exclusively examines curry as a foodstuff, nor focuses primarily on its local and global foodways.

3. Janet Theophano, Eat My Words: Reading Women's Lives Through the Cookbooks They Wrote (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 6.

4. Theophano, Eat My Words, 3.

5. Arjun Appadurai, “How to Make a National Cuisine: Cookbooks in Contemporary India,” in Food and Culture: A Reader, 2nd edition, eds. Carole Counihan and Penny Van Esterik (New York: Routledge, 2008), 289.

6. William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair [1840] (New York: Penguin, 2003), 30–31.

7. Thackeray, Vanity Fair, 34 (emphasis in original).

8. Collingham, Curry, 133.

9. Helen Pike Bauer, “Eating in the Contact Zone,” in Consuming Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century, eds. Tamara S. Wagner and Narin Hassan (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007), 95.

10. Mary Procida, “Feeding the Imperial Appetite: Imperial Knowledge and Anglo-Indian Domesticity,” Journal of Women's History 15.2 (2003), 141.

11. See Collingham, Curry, 109–10, 115, 130.

12. Collingham, Curry, 130.

13. James Holzman, The Nabobs in England: A Study of the Returned Anglo-Indian, 1760–1785 (New York: Holzman, 1926), 90.

14. Holzman, The Nabobs in England, 78.

15. Michael H. Fisher, The First Indian Author in English: Dean Mahomed (1759–1851) in India, Ireland, and England (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 257.

16. From the (London) Times, 27 March 1811; quoted in Fisher, The First Indian Author in English, 258.

17. Collingham, Curry, 129.

18. Troy Bickham, “Eating the Empire: Intersections of Food, Cookery, and Imperialism in Eighteenth-Century Britain,” Past and Present 198 (2008), 104.

19. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy (London: Author, 1747), 52. Image accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

20. Alan Davidson, “Curry Powder,” The Oxford Companion to Food (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 236.

21. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, Made Plain and Easy … With Additions, 4th edition (London: Author, 1751), 101. Images accessed through Eighteenth Century Collections Online.

22. Mary Cole, The Lady's Complete Guide; or Cookery in All Its Branches (London: G. Kearsley, 1788), 191; Maximilian Hazelmore, Domestic Economy; or, a Complete System of English Housekeeping (London: J. Creswick & Co., 1794), 118.

23. Gilly Lehmann, The British Housewife: Cookery Books, Cooking, and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Totnes, UK: Prospect Books, 2003), 110.

24. Burton, The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of the British in India (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), 74.

25. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 4 May 1784.

26. Tillman W. Nechtman, “Nabobs Revisited: A Cultural History of British Imperialism and the Indian Question in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain,” History Compass 4.4 (2006), 655.

27. The Morning Herald and Daily Advertiser, 4 May 1784.

28. Charlotte Mason, The Lady's Assistant for Regulating and Supplying her Table (London: J. Walter, 1773), 245.

29. Susanna Kellet, Elizabeth Kellet, and Mary Kellet, A Complete Collection of Cookery Receipts (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: T. Saint, 1780), 28–29.

30. Mrs. Frazer, The Practice of Cookery, Pastry, Pickling, Preserving, &c. (Edinburgh: Peter Hill, T. Cadell, 1791), 69.

31. Richard Briggs, The English Art of Cookery, 3rd edition (London: G.G. and J. Robinson, 1794), 245–246.

32. Lehmann, The British Housewife, 257.

33. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, in which are included, one hundred new receipts, not inserted in any former edition. With a copious index (London: printed for T. Longman, B. Law, J. Johnson, G. G. and J. Robinson, H. Gardner [and 19 others], 1796), 129.

34. Arthur Hill Hassan's Adulterations Detected; or, Plain Instructions for the Discovery of Frauds, published in many editions throughout the 1850s, identified dangerous levels of lead and vermillion in cayenne pepper—one of the main ingredients in bottled British curry powders. Also, articles in the Dublin Review (Ed. Nicholas Patrick Wiseman, 1855), The Lancet (vol. 2, 1852), Chambers’ Encyclopedia (1865) and other publications quoted Hassan's findings or introduced their own.

35. From Queen 6 January 1886; quoted in Nupur Chaudhuri, “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain,” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, eds. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 239.

36. Isabella Beeton, Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management [1861] (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2000), 133.

37. Modern Domestic Cookery, Based on the Well-Known Work of Mrs. Rundell (London: John Murray, 1851), 311.