Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  Drain the rice and put in a cooking pot with salt, cinnamon stick, cardamom pods, whole cloves and 1½ litres of boiling water. Simmer for 10 minutes and then drain.

  Meanwhile, fry the cooked potatoes.

  Take a large casserole and put the marinated meat mixture in the bottom of the pot. Nestle the hard-boiled eggs in among the meat, and sprinkle with a few sprigs of mint. Spread the red lentils over the meat. Then place the potatoes in a layer over the lentils. Spread the rice over the potatoes.

  Fry the slices of onion and the slivered almonds in a little oil and scatter over the rice. Sprinkle a little water over the contents of the casserole. Close the lid tightly and put over a high heat for 5 minutes. When the contents begin to sizzle, turn the heat to low and simmer for 1 hour.

  Green mango sherbet

  For a long time the Mughal emperors mourned their lost homeland in central Asia and pined for melons. But by the time the third emperor, Jahangir, came to the throne he had switched his allegiance and thought Indian mangoes sweeter and better than any central Asian melon. Mangoes, the Mughals found, made good sherbets. Serves 3–4.

  2 raw green mangoes

  6 tablespoons of sugar

  1 teaspoon of salt

  ½ teaspoon roasted, and then ground, cumin seeds

  sprig of fresh mint

  250ml cold water

  Roast the whole mangoes in a hot oven until they are soft. Allow them to cool and then make a hole in the skin and squeeze out the pulp. Put the pulp in a blender and process with the sugar, cumin, salt and mint. Add cold water and pour into chilled glasses.

  View of the fortified city of Goa in 1509, showing the

  Portuguese war fleet in the East Indies

  fn1 One seer was equivalent to about 1 kilogram and a dam was about 21 grams.

  3

  Vindaloo: the Portuguese and the chilli pepper

  IN THE WEST the chilli pepper is probably the spice most associated with Indian food. Dishes from every region of the South Asian subcontinent use fresh, dried, ground or powdered chillies; it is difficult to imagine Indian cookery without them. And yet no Indian had ever seen, let alone cooked with, a chilli before the Portuguese arrived in India at the beginning of the fifteenth century.

  Before 1500, pepper was the hottest spice in the Indian culinary repertoire. It came in two forms. The most widely used was the long catkin-like fruit of the hot and sweet Piper longum, known as long pepper. (The English word pepper is derived from pippali, its Hindi name.) This plant is native to Bengal but by the sixteenth century it grew wild along the south-west Malabar coast.1 The jeweller Jean-Baptiste Tavernier noticed that the Muslims threw long pepper into their pilaus ‘by the handful’.2 The other form was the small round fruit of the Piper nigrum, gol mirch in Hindi, or the black pepper which is familiar to us in the West.

  Ayurvedic physicians used both kinds of peppers extensively in their medicines to cure patients afflicted with phlegm and wind, and long pepper was valued as a means to increase semen, the source of a man’s strength according to Ayurvedic reasoning. One of the more outlandish Ayurvedic recipes to be found in a nineteenth-century pharmacopoeia recommended frog boiled with black pepper and turmeric as a cure for madness. More appetising was a recipe for lark cooked with long pepper, turmeric and salt, used to treat severe fevers.3

  The ancient Greeks and Romans used both peppers for similar medical purposes (to cure impotence, for example) and they greatly valued pepper for flavouring meat and fish. Ships loaded with gold and silver were sent from Roman Egypt to India’s south-western coast and returned heavy with pepper, which the Caesars stored like precious metals in their treasury.4 Medieval Europeans had an equally strong hunger. Along with ginger and cinnamon, pepper accounted for 93 per cent of the spices annually imported into Venice between 1394 and 1405.

  In Europe, spices were initially prized for their medicinal properties. They were thought to ward off the plague, stimulate the appetite and aid digestion. Cooks also found that they helped to liven up the bland vegetarian and fish dishes which were consumed on the numerous fast days of the Christian calendar. The use of spices increased significantly during the thirteenth century. At this time French, Catalan and Latin translations of an Arabic folk tale about a Garden of Delights were in circulation. Fascinated by the Muslim attitude to food as a source of pleasure, Europeans found the idea of heaven as a place of Epicurean indulgence an inviting contrast to severe Christian teachings which valued self-denial. The influence of the spicy Arab cuisine on European cookery can be seen in the increasing number of recipes which called for sugar, ginger, grains of paradise and pepper. Many Europeans thought spices, because they came from such faraway exotic places, possessed magical powers. Thus they merited an important place in the conspicuous consumption of the wealthy.5 By the fifteenth century virtually every recipe contained spices of some sort. However, the idea that medieval cooks were heavy-handed with spices in order to disguise the taste of rotten meat is misguided. Those wealthy enough to afford spices would have been able to buy good fresh meat. Rather than throwing spices into dishes in a random fashion to disguise rancid ingredients, the cooks used spices with great care, to enhance the flavour of the food. Pepper was the king of spices and the apothecary of an affluent medieval household would have always had some in store, while in the kitchen the cooks would have kept some ready-ground, close to hand in a special leather pouch. It was the one spice which seems to have been used by medieval people on almost all levels of the social scale.6

  For their supply of spices, medieval Europeans relied on a chain of traders, which began with Chinese and Malayan merchants who toured the spice islands of the Pacific. They brought the goods back to China and Malaya, from where they were taken across the Indian Ocean to the ports of India, and then on over the Arabian Sea to the African continent. Arab traders transported them across Africa and the Mediterranean until they finally reached the European entrepôts of Venice and Genoa. Other Europeans had always resented having to pay whatever price the Italians chose to charge, but when the Ottomans captured Constantinople in 1453, and then invaded Egypt at the end of the fifteenth century, prices began to spiral out of control. Throughout the fifteenth century the price of pepper was fairly stable but between 1496 (when it cost forty-two ducats the hundredweight) and 1499 it nearly doubled in price. By 1505 pepper in Cairo cost 192 ducats the hundredweight. Such prices provided a great incentive to find an alternative route to the Indies which would enable the successful nation to capture the lucrative spice trade.

  When he set sail in 1492, Christopher Columbus was convinced that by sailing west he would eventually reach the spice islands and open up a direct sea route to China. In particular, he hoped to find a cheap source of pepper. On landing in the Caribbean, he firmly believed that he had reached his goal and that he was in the outer reaches of the Indies. In a letter written after his return to Europe, he described how the islanders ate their food ‘heavily seasoned with hot spices’. In particular they used a vegetable which they called aji. This was the first European encounter with the chilli pepper. Columbus was certain that aji was a form of the pepper plant he was looking for and he named it ‘pepper of the Indies’.7 In fact, it was one of the many varieties of capsicum which the native American peoples had been cultivating to flavour their food since 4000 BC. The capsicum plants of America are unrelated to the pepper plants of Asia. But the name has stuck and the fruits of all capsicums have become known as peppers. The word chilli itself comes from Mexico where, some years later, the Spaniards came across a wide variety of cultivars of the Capsicum annuum which the Aztecs called chilli.

  Although Columbus insisted until the end of his life that he had discovered the offshore islands of Asia, it quickly became clear to the Spaniards that he had in fact discovered a New World, which they set about incorporating into their own. Despite the complaints of an early Spanish soldier about the horrible diet of maize cakes, prickly pears and chillies, the majority of
the Spanish settlers in the Americas took to munching chillies with enthusiasm.8 A Spanish physician writing in the 1570s attributed to chillies medicinal properties similar to those of black pepper: ‘it dooeth comforte muche, it dooeth dissolve windes, it is good for the breaste, and for theim that bee colde of complexion: it doeth heale and comforte, strengthenyng the principall members’. The Spaniards used chillies in much the same way as black pepper. They flavoured pork dishes with them and invented spicier versions of staple Iberian recipes. It was claimed that the sweet pork from the Toluca valley, west of Mexico, when combined with chillies, made a chorizo sausage to rival any found in Old Spain.9 In the home country their compatriots were less enchanted, however, and on the Iberian peninsula chillies were grown more as curious ornamental plants than as sources of a fiery flavouring.10

  In May 1498, six years after Columbus crossed the Atlantic, three Portuguese vessels anchored off the town of Calicut on India’s Malabar coast. Funded by King Emanuel of Portugal, and under the command of Vasco da Gama, these vessels had succeeded where Columbus had failed. They had discovered the sea route to the Indies, by choosing a more cautious approach: following in the wake of previous Portuguese explorers, they had made their way down the west coast of Africa, round the Cape of Good Hope and then sailed across the Arabian Sea to India.

  The Portuguese relationship with the Indians did not begin auspiciously. An audience with the king of Calicut was arranged but the meeting was not a success. The king’s courtiers laughed at the presents da Gama had brought: ‘cloth, a dozen coats, six hats, some coral, six basins, a bale of sugar, and two barrels each of butter, probably rancid from the long journey, and of honey’. He departed three months later under a cloud.11 Nevertheless, his ship was loaded down with pepper, bought for three ducats the hundredweight. On da Gama’s triumphant return to Lisbon a gloomy Venetian observed that although the price of pepper had fallen to twenty-two ducats, the Portuguese were still able to make a profit of 100 per cent on their pepper. He predicted correctly that from then on Europeans would turn away from Venice and look to Lisbon for their spices.12

  Within three years the Portuguese were back in India. In 1505, Lopo Soares’s fleet of nine vessels departed from the Malabar coast with a cargo which included 1,074,003 kilograms of pepper, 28,476 kilograms of ginger, 8,789 kilograms of cinnamon and 206 kilograms of cardamom.13 By 1530, the Portuguese had established a capital at Goa, a string of fifty forts around the Gulf of Cambay and along the west coast of India, outposts on the Coromandel coast and in Bengal, all protected by a fleet of a hundred ships.14 They had wrested control of the spice trade from the Arabs (who turned to vicious piracy) and had begun their ruthless domination of the East Indies trade which was to last for most of the sixteenth century.

  It was by means of the Portuguese that the chilli pepper found its way to India. It is not known exactly when chillies arrived on the Malabar coast, but thirty years after Vasco da Gama first set foot on Indian soil, there were at least three different types of chilli plant growing around Goa. In India, the confusion with the pepper plant which Columbus had initiated continued. Chillies were known as ‘Pernambucco pepper’, a name which indicated that the initial imports probably came from Brazil via Lisbon. Further afield, in Bombay, they were known as Gowai mirchi, or Goan pepper, a label suggesting that Goa was their point of entry into India.15 The south Indians, who used black and long pepper abundantly in their dishes to create fiery, piquant sauces, took to chillies straight away. The chilli was very similar to long pepper in appearance and therefore did not look too unfamiliar. It had a similar hot taste and was much easier to grow and store than long pepper, which was susceptible to mould. Chillies were soon cheaper than long pepper and eventually supplanted it.16

  It is surprising how quickly chillies became essential to the south Indian diet. Indians were often slow to accept new foodstuffs, but only a few years after chillies had been introduced a south Indian poet declared them the ‘Saviour of the Poor’. They provided a cheap and easy way to give taste to a simple meal of rice and lentils. Even Ayurvedic physicians, who rarely incorporated foreign foods into the cosmic world of diet and health, replaced pepper with chillies in many of their remedies. While the ancient recipes prescribed pepper water for those afflicted with cholera, nineteenth-century Ayurvedic physicians often used chilli both in plasters and in soups to treat the cholera patient.17 By this time they were a staple of the Indian diet and, ‘ground into a paste between two stones, with a little mustard oil, ginger and salt, they form[ed] the only seasoning which the millions of poor can obtain to eat with their rice’.18 Even today, chillies are still often the sole flavouring many can afford and therefore constitute a vital source of vitamin C for the poor of India. South Indian cooking in particular is now notorious for its heavy-handed use of chillies to create dishes, the heat of which numb the tongue. A Keralan recipe, for example, uses green chillies and chicken in proportions of a hundred grams of chillies to seven hundred grams of chicken, plus generous helpings of ground red chilli powder.19

  Northern Europeans became familiar with chillies by means of an unexpected and circuitous route. There was some awareness that Columbus had discovered a pungent ‘Spanish pepper’, and examples of South American chilli peppers would almost certainly have travelled from Lisbon and Seville to the ports of Antwerp and London by the 1540s. But the majority of Northern Europeans believed that chillies were native to India. Indeed, India was almost certainly the source of most chillies to be found in Germany, Holland or Britain in the sixteenth century. They were introduced by the Turks, whose source of supply is uncertain, though it seems likely that capsicums grown on the west coast of India were dried or ground into powder and then traded along the medieval spice routes across the Arabian Sea into Persia. From there dried chillies, cayenne pepper and paprika would have found their way north along the trade routes connected to the Black Sea ports, where they were incorporated into Turkish cuisine. In 1526, the Turks conquered Hungary and paprika, later the hallmark spice of Hungarian cookery, was introduced into the region. This complicated migration engendered a confusion as to the origins of the chilli. A herbal published by the German physician and botanist Leonard Fuchs in 1542 described its different varieties. He had obtained the seeds from Hungary but referred to them as ‘Calicut’ and ‘Indian’ pepper, thereby indicating his belief that they were native to India.

  It took a long time for chillies to become popular in Northern Europe. They did supplant the long pepper (which began to fall out of use during the sixteenth century) but Europeans continued to prefer black pepper, which remained the most commonly used spice. It was not until the nineteenth century that chillies began to appear in British recipes. And then they entered the cookery books in Indian curry recipes, further conflating them in the British mind with the Indian subcontinent rather than with the Americas.20

  When the Dutchman Jan Huyghen van Linschoten arrived in Goa in September 1583, almost a century after Vasco da Gama landed at Calicut, he was surprised to discover the wives of the Portuguese eating Indian food. A typical meal was boiled rice with a thin watery soup poured over it, salt fish, mango pickle, and a fish or meat sauce. These were dishes strange to a sixteenth-century European whose staple diet was wheat bread and roast meats. Not only did the Portuguese in India eat unfamiliar food, they ate it with their hands in the Indian manner. Indeed, the women laughed at anyone they observed using a spoon.21

  Many of the Portuguese settlers had adopted a variety of Indian habits. The men had discarded their tight knee-length hose for ‘a sort of breeches, called Candales, the like whereof I never saw in any part of Europe; for when they are ty’d they leave something like the tops of Boots on the Leg. Others under a short Doublet, wear wide silk Breeches; and some have them hang down to their Ankles.’22 Even more peculiar, they regularly changed their underclothes. In Europe, it was customary to rub oneself down with one’s old linen underclothes before putting on a fresh undershirt, and a ba
th was out of the question. In contrast, the Portuguese in India were scrupulously clean. Besides regularly changing their linen, they took a bath at least once, and sometimes twice, a day. Nor did the women ever fail to wash ‘as often as they ease themselves or make water, or use the companie of their husbands’. These were habits unusual in Europe.

  The women observed purdah, and wore veils when they went outside. Although the wealthy hung themselves with ‘jewels, and rosaries of Gold and Silver many times double’, to indicate their Christian faith, they wore Indian clothes: thin, almost transparent, swathes of material above the waist and petticoats, bare legs and colourful slippers below. ‘Being nurtured up in a lowly Bashfulness, whereby they are render’d unfit for Conversation’, the wives were said to spend their days idly chewing betel nut, and washing and rubbing themselves with sweet-smelling perfumes and sandalwood. These were all practices, Linschoten observed, they had learned and ‘received of the Indian Heathens, which have had these customs of long time’.23

  Linschoten had come to India in the suite of Vincente de Fonseca, the newly appointed Bishop of Goa. During his childhood in the Netherlands (then under Spanish rule) Linschoten, his imagination fed by adventure stories and histories, had dreamed of travelling the world. At the age of sixteen he followed his two elder brothers to Seville and six years later one of his brothers, who was a clerk on board a ship in the India fleet, managed to get him the position with the bishop. Goa was by now the capital of the Portuguese Estado da India (State of India), the Indian territory which the Portuguese used as their base for their trade in spices. Here, Linschoten discovered a lively colonial society, which he described in his Itinerario published thirteen years later in 1596.