A Culinary History of the British in India. - book reviews

Contemporary Review, Dec, 1993 by Molly Mortimer

David Burton. Faber. 1993. 214.99. 0 571 14389 X.

The Rai at Table presents an alarming collection of some 60 recipes, eaten at the oddest times in tune with the changing fashions of 19th century England rather than the climate. Given the speed of food decay, one can only be thankful that tinned foods had arrived in time for tiffin in the 1830s.

Memsahibs continue to get a bad press despite the high efforts of writer Flora Steele in the 1860s. Apart from running a family, designing public buildings and local education, she was rightly called the Mrs. Beeton of India. But many were blamed for rejecting local foods in favour of a curious cuisine of impossible combinations complicated by caste cooking. (Food is bad enough as a cultural divide, but politically at least it had only the Mutiny to be blamed for.) Hindu revulsion against eating cow, was at least more religious than ours against Korean dog eater, French predilection for horse meat, and African dislike of egg eaters.

Anglo-Indian cooking at best did achieve a cultural balance and resulted in the classical dishes of curry-Tamil-kari meaning sauce; mulligatawny, Tamilmilagu and tunni-pepper water; kedgeree and oddly, worcester sauce, despite its name, Indian. Mr. Burton, a veteran in international cuisine, points out that English stomachs were not so strange to hot spices, and maybe took some of these spices to India. Elizabethan diet rich in peppers supported the new East India Company in 1599 in its search for spies. For it had hardly emerged from mediaeval cookery and the need to disguise rotting meat with spice.

While the Raj at Table has not quite the charm of Jennifer Brennans Curries and Bugles, a first hand account of Raj life, it is a sensible and readable supplement with enough menus to whet, or wreck, the appetite.