The British Table and the Raj

The British table in India begins with the East India Company's trading posts of the early seventeenth century and runs through the Crown Rule that followed 1858 to Independence in 1947. It took shape in the presidency towns of Calcutta, Madras and Bombay, in the cantonments, and in the hill stations to which households withdrew in the hot weather. Raghavan Iyer, in On the Curry Trail, follows the word and the dish called curry out of this meeting of Indian kitchens and British households.

The Company's servants arrived as traders and ate largely as the people around them did, and the household cooks who served them were Indian: Muslim khansamas in the north and east, Goan and south Indian cooks in the west and south. The word curry is the British rendering of the subcontinent's many sauced dishes, and in the British household it became a single category, served with rice at tiffin or at dinner. Iyer traces how a word that covered a hundred regional dishes was carried home and, in time, turned into one idea of Indian food, a standard sauce seasoned with a spice mixture sold under a single name. The cooks answered the British table by adapting. Roasts, cutlets, puddings and custards were made in kitchens that also made pulao and korma, and the dishes that resulted belong to neither side alone. Mulligatawny, from the Tamil milagu thanni, pepper water, became a soup course. Kedgeree, a descendant of the rice and lentil khichri, became a breakfast dish of rice, smoked fish and egg. Country captain, the spiced fried or braised fowl, passed through the same households. These are the dishes of the Raj, and the Anglo-Indian kitchen carries many of them on. The daily order of the household mattered as much as any dish. Chhota hazri, the early tea, preceded breakfast, tiffin, a light midday meal, gave the English language a word for the lunch box, and dinner closed the day. Tea itself passed from a Chinese import to a plantation crop of Assam and Darjeeling, planted under Company and Crown, and from there to the habit of the whole country. The club, the dak bungalow and the railway refreshment room spread a shared repertoire of cutlets, roasts and sauced dishes across the cantonments. The tale runs both ways. Bread, biscuits, tinned goods, the potato and the cauliflower grew in the Indian kitchen's repertoire, while spice mixtures and chutneys went to Britain in jars. Iyer's account is of a table made by Indian cooks working under British instruction and British appetite, and the cooks' names are largely lost to the record. What remains is the vocabulary and the dishes, which Indian households, restaurants and the diaspora still cook, often far from the Raj that named them.

The table of the Raj was served in courses, with rice, a sauced dish, dry accompaniments and chutneys set beside roast and cutlet. A cook of the period would balance heat with sweet and sour condiments, such as mango chutney and lime pickle, which became staples of the colonial meal. The Anglo-Indian kitchen still holds this mixture of pepper, tamarind, coconut and European method in its pot roasts, cutlets and soups.