Curry

by Lizzie Collingham

  An Indo-Fijian taxi driver I spoke to in 2001 laughed aloud when I asked him if he ate Fijian food. ‘I’d rather starve,’ he cried. ‘I’d rather eat grass.’6 George Speight, the radical nationalist leader of the last political coup in Fiji in 2000, argued that the Indo-Fijians who make up 48 per cent of Fiji’s population should be denied political representation because they refuse to assimilate. He denounced them for wearing Indian clothes and eating Indian food. However, journalists claim to have observed George Speight and his political allies tucking into a curry. While Indians tend to preserve their eating habits wherever they end up living, their hosts, no matter how hostile, frequently cannot resist their cooking.

  Indian food has become a popular fast food in many of the countries to which it travelled. In South Africa, Indians (known as bunnys from the mispronunciation of the word Banian) set up small eating houses selling curry and rice. Black South Africans developed a taste for these spicy dishes, but under apartheid it was illegal for them to be served in an Indian establishment. The problem was solved by serving the curries in hollowed-out loaves of bread which could be quickly passed to the customer at the back door and eaten without cutlery. These fast-food loaves filled with curry were known as bunny chow (Indian food).7 In Fiji and the Caribbean, Indian food has become the fast food.8 On the street corners, food stalls sell roti wraps to passers-by of every ethnic origin. These are soft thin rounds of bread, filled with a rich, oily and satisfying filling of chicken in a tomato sauce spiked with cumin.9

  Rotis are the Punjabi version of chapattis, made from unrefined wholemeal wheat flour mixed with water, kneaded into a dough, and rolled out into thin circles and baked on a hot griddle. Fijians working as domestics in the homes of wealthy Indo-Fijians, or in the kitchens of restaurants and hospitals, learned how to make this simple Indian bread and took the skill back to their villages. Salote Sauvou grew up in a remote village on the island of Vanua Levu in the 1970s, and for breakfast, she and the other village children would eat a rolled-up roti and drink a cup of tea. The Fijians have made some adjustments to Indian rotis, however. Salote’s mother, like most Fijian women, made her rotis with refined flour and, to soften it, she would dip the dough into coconut milk (one of the most important foods in Fiji).

  The indentured labourers were often hampered by the lack of Indian ingredients in their new countries. Frequently they had to make do with a few lentils, rice, wheat flour and a little turmeric. This forced them to adapt their cookery to the ingredients available in their new homelands – in South Africa, for example, cornmeal often replaced lentils. But wherever freed indentured labourers have formed communities of rural labourers, they have been followed by Gujarati traders and businessmen, who supply them with Indian clothes, jewellery and foodstuffs. In Fiji, the Gujarati firm of Punja & Sons has been supplying the Indo-Fijian community with a huge variety of separate spices and masala mixes since 1958. In the last ten years, however, the Fijians have also begun to buy curry powders and dried chillies. Growing up on her island, Salote Sauvou had never encountered curry, but when she came to the capital city of Suva she learned how to make chicken curry. Indian dishes are now beginning to spread into the Fijian villages. The children of Lovoni on the tiny island of Ovalau, a day’s journey from Suva, eat school lunches of dhal on Monday, curry on Friday and Fijian-style soup and tinned fish on the other days.10 Part of curry’s popularity among the Fijian adult population stems from the fact that it goes well with the local intoxicating drink kava, which numbs and thickens the tongue.

  From Fiji, Indian food has spread to other Pacific islands. The University of the South Pacific has contributed to this process. When the university opened in 1968 the students’ canteen was divided into an Indian section offering ‘roti, rice, meat and vegetable curry and dhal’ and an island section offering ‘boiled root crops, beef, pork, [and] tapioca’. At first the students ate their own food at separate tables. Eventually, however, they began to experiment. This has worked strongly in favour of the Indian food. When one Indo-Fijian professor travels around the different Pacific countries visiting students, he finds that they often ‘talk fondly about Indian food. When visiting Suva they eat nothing else.’11

  In the last ten years small bottles of very yellow curry powder have passed from Pacific island to Pacific island, and even on islands where there is no history of Indian immigration the inhabitants can be found cooking curries. These curries are, however, so removed from anything which might be eaten on the subcontinent that they are almost unrecognisable as Indian food. Since the introduction of tinned foods by European missionaries in the nineteenth century, Pacific islanders have developed a preference for tinned foods as markers of high status. In Samoa, they make tinned fish and corned beef curries flavoured with curry powder mixed with flour, and curry is a luxury food. Even for a comparatively well-off family earning about forty Samoan dollars a week, a bottle of curry powder costing three dollars, which lasts for two meals, is a relatively expensive purchase. Plus the corned beef would also have to be bought from the local store. Curry is rarely eaten with rice and instead is accompanied by boiled taro or breadfruit which are grown in every Samoan’s garden. Surprisingly, curry powder is even beginning to catch on in Tonga where spices and flavourings, including salt, are very rarely added to food.

  The islands of Tonga are home to a small community of immigrant Indo-Fijians and Gujaratis, and the Taste of India restaurant, housed in a tiny white clapboard house in the capital Nuku’alofa, offers a typical Indian restaurant menu. In their homes the Indians continue to cook Indian food: prawns in coconut milk, khicharis of rice and yellow lentils, spiced aubergine and sweet-and-sour okra. They have not been infected by the islanders’ passion for canned goods and retain their preference for fresh ingredients. The one Tongan foodstuff which has been incorporated into their cookery is roro, the leaves of the taro plant. Taro is a root crop like yam and the Pacific islanders boil or roast it in their earth ovens. They also use the leaves once they have carefully removed the main stem because, if eaten, it releases juices which cause an unpleasant sensation like pins and needles in the back of the throat and tongue. Tongans chop up the leaves and fry them with tinned fish and maybe a few onions. The Indians in Tonga rub the leaves with a sweet-and-sour mix of chickpea flour, sugar, treacle, spices and tamarind. Rolled up and steamed, or cut into pieces and fried, this Indian version of roro is said to be very popular with the King of Tonga when he eats with his Indian friends.

  Recipe for roro (taro leaves) Indian style

  Taro leaves (remove stalk and slice off centre stem)

  125g wheat flour

  125g gram flour (chickpea flour)

  125g rice flour

  1 onion, grated

  2 tablespoons chilli powder

  lemon-sized ball of tamarind pulp

  a large ball of jaggery, double the size of the tamarind, grated

  2 teaspoons coriander powder

  2 teaspoons cumin powder

  2 teaspoons salt

  coriander leaves, minced

  Mix all the flours, onion, chilli powder, tamarind pulp, jaggery, coriander and cumin powders and salt with enough water to make a thick paste. Spread the mixture on the leaves and make rolls. Steam the rolls for 20 minutes. Cool. Slice the rolls. Serve garnished with coriander leaves or grill in an oven at 200 degrees for 10 to 15 minutes till brown.

  Indians living in the Caribbean and South Africa have shown more openness to the foods of their new home countries than the descendants of indentured labourers living on the Pacific islands. In Trinidad, they make a kind of khichari using rice and lentils but flavoured with chives, parsley and thyme, which were themselves introduced to the Caribbean by Europeans.12 They have also replaced the cayenne chilli peppers commonly used in India with the lantern-shaped Scotch bonnet chillies native to the island. Their sweeter perfume, combined with roasted ground cumin and European herbs, give their food a Caribbean flavour. Here the history of the chilli pepper a
nd Indian food has come full circle. Scotch bonnet chillies were the ‘Indian peppers’ or aji which Columbus discovered on his first voyage in 1492.

  Indian food is versatile. It has travelled the world and blended with a wide and eclectic range of cuisines without being subsumed and thereby losing its distinctively Indian style. Outlandishly, it was in a small pocket of agricultural California in the 1910s and 20s that Indian food first worked its way into North American food culture in the guise of a surprising culinary mixture. Chicken curry probably first appeared on an American restaurant menu at either the El Ranchero in Yuba City or at Pancho’s in Selma. These restaurants served curry and rotis alongside Mexican enchiladas.13 In the late 1890s a tiny number of Punjabi men began arriving on the west coast of America. They were often second sons who had been sent abroad to help pay off their family’s debts or finance a struggling farm. They were nearly all poorly educated and young (sixteen to thirty-five) and had heard tales of the incredibly high wages paid to farm labourers in America (two dollars a day in comparison to ten or fifteen cents in India). They intended to make their fortunes and return home as soon as possible. Many of them left behind wives and children. Moola Singh arrived in California in 1911 aged fifteen, leaving behind him a young and embittered bride. He had only been married for three months when he told his wife that he was going to America. ‘“You’re leaving me here?” she asked. “Yes,” he replied, “my mother is here.” “What do I need a mother for? You started love; I need you.”’ Moola promised to return in six years. His wife told him she would give him three.14

  On the west coast the Punjabis found jobs building and repairing railway tracks, in lumber mills and working on fruit and vegetable farms. Although the wages had sounded high they were quickly gobbled up by the cost of living. The Indians lived in miserable conditions, and slept in shacks and outbuildings on the farms where they worked. Every evening the men would cook together, attempting to replicate the food which they would have eaten at home. Their diet consisted of a little chicken or lamb (which they would kill themselves), chapattis, a few vegetables, and as much milk and butter as they could lay their hands on. In northern India ghee (rather than meat) is regarded as the source of physical strength and ‘the daughter of a Korean farmer in California recalled how much the Sikh labourers enjoyed their butter: “They would sit around a large pot of melted butter and garlic, dipping tortillas made with flour and water into it.”’15

  Moola Singh eventually saved up enough money to bring his young bride over from the Punjab. But by then the immigration laws had changed to prevent wives joining their husbands. The white workers, fearing their jobs were under threat, subjected them to a torrent of racial abuse and violence.16 The hostility of white workers caused Canada to close down Indian immigration altogether in 1909. The United States followed suit in 1917. Despite all the fuss, only 6,400 Indians had come to America, and yet the atmosphere remained unwelcoming. In 1924, the citizenship was revoked of those Indians who had become naturalised Americans, and Indians were denied the right to own land or marry into the white population. This had the desired effect of persuading about three thousand to return home. Many of those who stayed on found consolation among their fellow agricultural labourers and married Mexican women. Marriage had the added advantage in that it enabled the men to buy small farms through their wives, who were legally entitled to own land.17 During the 1930s in California a tiny community formed of about three thousand Mexican Hindus, as they were called. (Although most of the men were Sikhs, the Americans referred to them as Hindus.) Moola Singh married his Mexican wife Maria La Tocharia in 1932. By then his Indian wife, worn down by the life of a daughter-in-law without her husband, had died.18

  The Mexican-Punjabi marriages were characterised by a disproportionately high divorce rate.19 But one area where these couples seem to have been compatible was in their kitchens, where they developed a harmoniously blended ‘Mexican Hindu’ cuisine.20 Mexicans and Punjabis share a preference for fresh food, flavoured with freshly ground spices. The fried chicken or lamb of the Mexican women was not that dissimilar to the chicken curries of the Punjabi men. The chillies the latter were used to in India were easily interchangeable with Mexican jalapeño peppers. Punjabi lemon pickle went just as well with corn-based tortillas as it did with wheat-flour rotis. The men would prepare lassis made from buttermilk for the children and, if anyone fell sick, they would make special curative dishes, according to their Ayurvedic knowledge of hot and cold foods.

  The tiny numbers of the ‘Mexican-Hindu’ community and the strict United States immigration policy ensured that the combination of tortillas and chicken curry remained confined to California.

  Surprisingly, one country where curry occupies a position of national importance almost equal to the place of Indian food in Britain is Japan, which has no colonial connection with India and its own sophisticated food culture.

  The Japanese love curry. Every train station and shopping mall in Japan has a stand selling karee raisu (curry rice). Japanese noodle bars sell karee udon (curried wheat noodles), and bread shops offer a bread roll with a blob of curry sauce hidden inside them, called karee pan. In 1982, Japanese schoolchildren voted for curry as the favourite meal served to them by the national school-lunch programme, and pork cutlets, vegetable stir-fry and curry were the three dishes most often cooked for dinner in Japanese homes. The Curry House Ichibanya chain has three hundred stores all serving cheese, banana, frankfurter, fried chicken and squid curries, which can be ordered at seven levels of spiciness. There are even comic books in which the best ways of cooking a curry are earnestly discussed by the main characters.21 In January 2003, a curry museum opened in the port town of Yokohama, a fitting place as it was through the port towns that curry arrived in Japan.22 Until the 1860s Japan had turned its back on the rest of the world, but during the Meiji era (1868–1912) there came to power a new set of rulers who embraced Western culture and technology and raced to modernise Japan. British merchant ships began arriving at the ports and they brought with them a wide range of new foods: bread, ice cream, pork cutlets, potato croquettes, hashed beef and curry. It became very fashionable among the rising middle classes to eat these Western dishes. They were a luxurious expression of progressiveness and openness to the West. Curry recipes appeared in the new women’s magazines and cookery books. The curry which the British introduced to Japan was the Anglo-Indian version of Indian food that was commonplace throughout the Raj and which had found its way on to the menus of merchant ships and P&O steamers.23 Japanese recipes instructed the novice on how to mix curry powder with flour and then fry it in butter to produce a curry roux to which meat, vegetables and stock were added. Once the dish had simmered for a while, it was finished off with a dash of cream and a dribble of lemon juice.

  Only a few decades later Indian food as eaten by Indians was introduced to Japan. In 1912 Rash Behari Bose, a revolutionary Indian nationalist, fled the British authorities in Bengal. He found refuge with the right-wing militarist Black Dragon Society in Japan. There he married the daughter of a family with Black Dragon connections. While he helped spread anti-British propaganda among Indian students at Japanese universities, he also helped to popularise Indian food. Bose taught his father-in-law, who owned a bakery, how to make curry the Indian way without using either flour or curry powder. Soma Aizo used his new culinary skills to open a restaurant, named after his daughter, Nakamuraya, Rash Behari Bose’s wife. The restaurant is still there in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district and apparently still serves an R. B. Bose curry.24 Other Indian restaurants have followed, but the Japanese prefer their own versions of Anglo-Indian curry.

  Although Anglo-Indian-style curries were served in the Fegetudo Western-style restaurant as early as 1877, curry found its place in Japan not in elegant restaurants but in canteens. The army adopted curry and rice as an easy meal to cook in large quantities, and curries were also a good way of feeding the troops beef which the Japanese hoped would strengthen their phy
sique. During the Taisho era (1912–26), the army even used to advertise that it fed its troops curry, as it drew in new recruits, attracted by the glamorous aura of Westernness which still surrounded the dish.25 After the Second World War, curry and rice appeared on the school-lunch menu in schools throughout the country. Then, with the production of blocks of pre-prepared curry roux, it became popular in Japanese homes. All the tired cook needed to do was to fry some meat and vegetables, add water and a roux bar (which is a brown, sticky, rather evil-smelling square of flour, spices and fat) and simmer. The bars come in three strengths, mild, medium and hot, all of which are mild to Indian or British palates. The resulting brown mess is eaten with fluffy white rice and fukujinzuke (pickled vegetables).26 Part of curry’s appeal is that, because it inevitably looks like a sloppy brown mess, it is exempt from gochiso, the culinary laws of purity and perfection. Unlike sushi – complex to assemble, served with great care for the aesthetics of the food and eaten delicately – curry is poured over the rice on a Western plate and eaten with a spoon. It has thus become a Japanese comfort food: warm, sustaining and without need of ceremony.27

  Over the centuries, new foodstuffs and recipes have transformed Indian food. In modern India, the kitchens of the growing Indian bourgeoisie have joined the imperial kitchens of the Mughal emperors, the bakehouses of the Portuguese settlers at Goa, the Vaisnavite temple kitchens in the south and the cookhouses of the British in India as the engines of culinary change. Every town and city in India now has a substantial middle class made up of Indians from many different areas. Women living outside their home regions, away from the grandmothers and aunts who are the traditional sources of recipes and culinary advice, have turned to cookery books and recipe columns in newspapers and magazines for inspiration. These new English-language recipe books rarely confine themselves to dishes from one region. Thus, while housewives might look to them to help reproduce traditional food from their own regions, they are increasingly exposed to recipes from all round India. Indeed, it has become quite fashionable for women to widen their repertoire and impress their families and friends with their ability to cook new and unfamiliar dishes from across the subcontinent. Recently, an Indian cable television channel bought Madhur Jaffrey’s Flavours of India cookery series. In the programmes Jaffrey describes how to cook dishes from a variety of areas, thus fuelling the process of the interchange of recipes across regions. The series has been dubbed into Gujarati, Marathi, Punjabi and Bengali, ensuring that the process of exchange has also been encouraged among the non-English-speaking lower-middle classes.28 These developments have contributed to a process of fusion in Indian food culture, and out of the fragmented localised traditions of India, what might be called a national cuisine is beginning to develop.29