Culinary Jottings and the Anglo-Indian Household Manuals

The household manual of British India grew out of the nineteenth-century cantonment and the presidency town, where memsahibs who had never managed a kitchen found themselves directing a staff of Indian cooks whose language they did not speak. Culinary Jottings for Madras, first issued in the 1870s, is the best known of these books, and it stands among a family of English-language manuals written in Madras, Calcutta and Bombay for the Anglo-Indian table. Raghavan Iyer, in On the Curry Trail, follows the word curry and the dishes it came to cover through exactly this world of colonial kitchens and published recipes.

The manuals were written to solve a practical difficulty. An English wife in a station or a bungalow had to order the day's meals through a khansama or a cook, and she needed recipes, scales of expense, and a vocabulary of instruction in an unfamiliar tongue. The books answered with menus for the week, notes on marketing, and recipes that set Indian dishes beside English ones: roasts, puddings and savouries stood next to pilaus, kedgeree, mulligatawny and the dishes listed under the heading of curry. The Indian cook is the unnamed author of much of what they contain, since the dishes were learned from him and set down by his employer in English measures. Iyer's account of the word curry rests on this literature. He shows how a term the British took from the south, commonly traced to the Tamil kari, was stretched in the manuals to cover almost any sauced dish served with rice. The household books fixed an English idea of curry: a dish built on a single bought spice blend, curry powder, rather than on the masala a cook ground fresh for each dish according to region and occasion. Where the Indian kitchen varied the spicing from dish to dish, the manual often reduced it to one powder and one method. The manuals also record the dishes that the Anglo-Indian table made its own. Mulligatawny, taken from the Tamil milagu tannir, pepper water, became a soup with meat and rice in the English kitchen. Kedgeree descends from khichri, the Indian dish of rice and lentils, recast with fish and egg for the breakfast table. The dry curry, the ball curry and the cold-meat curry that used up the remains of the Sunday joint belong to the same household economy of thrift and adaptation. For a modern cook these books are evidence of a particular kitchen rather than a guide to regional practice, and they should be read with that in mind. They preserve the vocabulary of the cantonment, the habits of the colonial household and the transformation of Indian dishes under English direction. Used beside the regional authorities of this book, they show how a cuisine travelled, in translation and with loss, from the Indian cook's hands to the printed page and then abroad.

The Anglo-Indian table of the manuals ran from an early breakfast through a tiffin of curry and rice at midday to a formal dinner in the English manner. A curry of fowl or mutton with rice, accompanied by chutneys, pickles, grated coconut and crisp poppadums, was the usual midday dish. The accompaniments, set out in small dishes, were the part of the meal closest to the Indian practice of serving contrasting relishes beside the main plate.