Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors | Lizzie Collingham

Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors | Lizzie Collingham | A concoction that is India!

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Curry: A Tale of C...

	Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors Lizzie Collingham Oxford University Press, USA, 2007 - 352 pages average customer review:based on 18 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Curry serves up a delectable history of Indian cuisine, ranging from the imperial kitchen of the Mughal invader Babur to the smoky cookhouse of the British Raj.
In this fascinating volume, the first authoritative history of Indian food, Lizzie Collingham reveals that almost every well-known Indian dish is the product of a long history of invasion and the fusion of different food traditions. We see how, with the arrival of Portuguese explorers and the Mughal horde, the cooking styles and ingredients of central Asia, Persia, and Europe came to the subcontinent, where over the next four centuries they mixed with traditional Indian food to produce the popular cuisine that we know today. Portuguese spice merchants, for example, introduced vinegar marinades and the British contributed their passion for roast meat. When these new ingredients were mixed with native spices such as cardamom and black pepper, they gave birth to such popular dishes as biryani, jalfrezi, and vindaloo. In fact, vindaloo is an adaptation of the Portuguese dish "carne de vinho e alhos-"-the name "vindaloo" a garbled pronunciation of "vinho e alhos"--and even "curry" comes from the Portuguese pronunciation of an Indian word. Finally, Collingham describes how Indian food has spread around the world, from the curry houses of London to the railway stands of Tokyo, where "karee raisu" (curry rice) is a favorite Japanese comfort food. We even visit Madras Mahal, the first Kosher Indian restaurant, in Manhattan.
Richly spiced with colorful anecdotes and curious historical facts, and attractively designed with 34 illustrations, 5 maps, and numerous recipes, Curry is vivid, entertaining, and delicious--a feast for food lovers everywhere.

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Food as History

If your first taste of India was in a high school world history class, where you struggled to engorge and disgorge the indigestible names and exploits of Mughals, rajahs, and viceroys, this book will cleanse your palate. Dr. Cunningham uses the story of the development of diverse modern Indian cuisine as a savory entree into the religious, ethnic, and political history of the subcontinent, much as Jules Tygiel uses baseball as a lens for studying America in his book "Baseball As History." Curry is indeed a compelling synecdoche for pan-Indian culture. And Dr. Cunningham seasons her prose as skillfully as any chef, even to the point of including some artful recipes as illustrations of her basically scholarly narrative.

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A concoction that is India!

As a friend of mine once remarked, the measure of a culture is in the complexity & variety of its cuisine. Lizzie Collingham's book is a look into the development of this complexity & variety through centuries of conquests of the Indian mainland, & the consequent assimilation of societies, customs & spices.

From the Moghuls to the Potuguese & finally to the British, the Indian subcontinent's cuisine has been in a millenia-long flux. This book is the story of this flux. Sure, there is a huge plurality of cuisines, particularly regional, that aren't a part of this book, but, for me, what this book might/could/should have been is nearly not as important as what the book is.

As Collingham talks about the cuisines, she also documents a great deal of history & nuances often not part of text-book history. You'd find the Moghuls becoming "Indian" with Akbar, the Portuguese marrying Indian women & the consequent Indianization of the Portuguese househlds, & in the late 19th century, "...as Victorian Britain was enthusiastically embracing the idea of empire, & curry was becoming a favoured dish among the middle classes, Anglo-Indians were busily eradicating as many traces of India as possible from their culture."

Of course, there are recipes in this book. A mere handful of them. But they're all captured in the minutest of details. Unlike the 4 to 5 step Biriyani making process that you'd find on the web, this book's Biryani recipe is two & a half pages long - so that if you follow it well enough, you may be able to soften up an emperor enough to get a grant of 10 acres of prime real estate or some such royal favour.

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Fascinating!

This book is fascinating! Journeying through time the author goes to the very roots of Indian cooking and Indian ingredients. The impact British Raj had on Indian food is brought out very well with numerous anecdotes about the kings and British officers and their wives. Overall a charming book packed with history, contemporary curry cooking around the world and a lot of nostalgia!

Sumptious

Meticulously research but lovingly woven tapestry of anecdotes and ethnobotany. Each chapter is divided by dish or beverage.

Curry is apparently and English invention

Curry is the sort of food that is served in Indian resteraunts in countries such as England, America and Australia. The way that it is produced is that in the kitchen there will be three large vats of sauce. One will be a tomatoe based sauce another a butter based sauce and the other will be based on milk solids. Curry is produced by cooking either vegtables and meat and then adding the sauce. This process is hundreds of miles from how food is coooked in India. However it is the technique developed in England by former Bangledeshi sailors who were the ones who drifted into the resterant buisness. The method is cleary one that makes food production easy rather than producing the complex flavours of the food of India. (Again there is no real thing as Indian food as each part of India has a different tradition.)

One of the most popular dishes currently is Chicken Tikka Massala. Broadly tandoori chicken pieces cooked in a mixture of tomatoe sauce and cream. Apparently dreamed up in some English town, to freshen some slightly dried out chicken has now become a classic served in all English Indian resteraunts.

None of this should really surprise. The book outlines a fascinating history of food. The one clear thing is that food always seems to change. Chilli something thought to be an essential ingredient of Indian and South East Asian cooking was only introduced to Asia after the European discover of the new world. Prior to Columbus Indians and South East Asians used black pepper. Of course the tomatoe is of American orgin and one would wonder how Italian cuisine would have developed if America had not been discovered.

The book is a fascinating read and it is an insight into how flexible culture and fashions are.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4

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