The Diaspora Kitchen

The diaspora kitchen begins with movement under several different compulsions. Indentured labourers were shipped from the Gangetic plain and the south to Trinidad, Guyana, Mauritius, Fiji, Natal and Malaya from the 1830s, and traders from Gujarat and Sindh had long worked the western Indian Ocean coast of Africa. Raghavan Iyer follows these routes in On the Curry Trail, tracing how the food of the subcontinent was carried out, and how it was changed on arrival.

What travels first is the pantry. A migrant leaves with a memory of a dish and finds that its ingredients are missing or dear, so the cook keeps the method and replaces the produce. In the Caribbean the roti of the Gangetic plain survived as the dhal puri and the paratha, now wrapped around curried goat or chana and potato. Raghavan Iyer, in On the Curry Trail, follows the word curry along the roads the cooks took, since it was adopted and reshaped by the places it reached. In East Africa the Gujarati and Ismaili households that settled in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania added local produce to a vegetarian and coastal repertoire. Cassava, maize, sweet potato and coconut entered the kitchen, and the cooking of the Swahili coast met the cooking of Kutch and Kathiawar. Noorbanu Nimji and Karen Anderson, in A Spicy Touch, write from inside such a family, whose cooking passed from India to East Africa and then to Canada, each stage leaving its mark on the recipes. The same grain or lentil may be prepared in the same manner while the masala is adjusted to what the market carried. Southeast Asia and southern Africa gave other outcomes. Tamil labourers and traders in Malaya and Singapore kept the banana leaf meal and the tempered dish, and the cooking they met there brought coconut milk, lemongrass and shrimp paste into contact with their own. In Durban, Natal Indian communities made the bunny chow, a hollowed loaf filled with curry, as a portable meal, and it belongs to the history of indenture and the sugar estates. Each of these cuisines is Indian in structure and local in produce, and none is a copy of a dish at home. Britain and North America form a later chapter. Migration after 1947 and the arrivals from East Africa in the 1960s and 1970s built the restaurant trade, which then shaped the idea of Indian food abroad: a menu of sauces, a small number of dishes carrying a regional name, and a vocabulary the cooks at home would not have used. Meera Sodha, in East, and Anita Jaisinghani, in Masala, write as cooks who grew up inside this tradition and who return to home cooking, with the lentil, vegetable and bread dishes eaten in the family kitchen rather than the restaurant dining room. The diaspora kitchen is therefore two things at once: the preservation of regional method under strain, and the making of new dishes that are now part of the subcontinent's story.

The diaspora table is held together by the tempering of whole spices in hot fat, the use of ground masala, and the habit of bread or rice as the base of a meal, which survive wherever the cooks settle. What changes is the produce: Scotch bonnet pepper in the Caribbean, cassava and coconut in East Africa, shrimp paste and lemongrass in Malaya. A home meal in these communities often follows the shape of the thali, a number of small dishes about one staple, even when the dishes themselves are drawn from a new land.