The article mentions the difference between "BIR" (British Indian Restaurant) curries and food that you would find in India and I thought it'd be useful to provide some examples. In England "Tarka...
The article mentions the difference between "BIR" (British Indian Restaurant) curries and food that you would find in India and I thought it'd be useful to provide some examples.
In England "Tarka Daal" is a common accompaniment. It's a mildly spiced, garlicky, lentil soup. How to make British Indian Restaurant style tarka dal There are no "hot" spices in this recipe. No chilli, no Kashmiri chilli powder. Here's another recipe that starts with half a cup of dry lentils (important, because sometimes they're cooking a huge amount of food and obviously that'll need more spicing.) He doesn't add any hot spices to the lentils as they're cooking. But he adds 4 dried red chillies, some green chilli (maybe one chopped?), and some chilli powder too. (This is a great recipe!) Restaurant style Dal Tadka Here they're making large quantities, but still, the pan isn't that large and they use a big ladle full of chilli powder. Masaledar Tadka dal.
My town has a population of about 100,000 people and there are at least 20 curry houses here. Some of them are trying the new style, but lots of them do feel stuck in a very rigid BIR model.
One of the problems is "familiarity with the menu". People tend to have a few dishes that the like and that they stick with, and breaking past that comfort is going to be a challenge. I'm not sure that's massively important though, because younger people haven't developed those habits and are more keen to experiment.
Going to the UK for uni as an ethnically Indian foreign student I was really surprised to find the fairly rigid spice/style gradation (korma, balti, madras, jalfrezi, vindaloo, bhuna). Vindaloo...
Going to the UK for uni as an ethnically Indian foreign student I was really surprised to find the fairly rigid spice/style gradation (korma, balti, madras, jalfrezi, vindaloo, bhuna).
Vindaloo was especially confusing since as a Malayalee, the dish refers to a specifically Portuguese influenced pork curry from Kerala and Goa which uses quite a bit of vinegar and, while chilli forward, in comparison to many other Malayalee dishes which tend to be pepper forward, is not particularly spicy and quite sweet.
Luckily in Leicester you could get excellent Punjabi food.
I moved from Leicester to Anglesey. All we have here on Anglesey are typical BIR style, and I really miss the much more varied Indian cuisine which was available in Leicester. Growing up in...
I moved from Leicester to Anglesey. All we have here on Anglesey are typical BIR style, and I really miss the much more varied Indian cuisine which was available in Leicester. Growing up in Leicester means you have eaten off the standard BIR menu 1000 times and it's natural that something a little bit different would be popular there, not to mention a massive population of people who want something more authentic to their own culture supporting restaurants that specialised in the cuisine of different regions of India rather than the generic "Indian" restaurant menu available all over the UK.
I love Indian food, but the standard 'British Indian' menu has grown stale.
This was actually a bit of a culture shock when I moved. It wasn't the easiest move, and it was done at short notice, during covid and I had to move a month ahead of my partner and all our stuff,...
This was actually a bit of a culture shock when I moved.
It wasn't the easiest move, and it was done at short notice, during covid and I had to move a month ahead of my partner and all our stuff, so I only had what I could fit in one car load. After a tiring first day in my new rental I didn't have the energy to go shopping and limited cooking equipment. I opened just eat, where I was accustomed to seeing several hundred options.
There was one curry, no Chinese and a couple of chip shops. It sounds stupid and probably should have been obvious, but it really was a moment where I was taken aback with the realisation that this was going to be a very different place to live.
Love it now though, except the very limited choice of cuisine (and I still really need to improve my cooking of other cuisines)
I'm curious to know from your perspective whether the decline in BIR interest is in part due to a growing awareness of the evils of colonization and the fact that younger generation no longer...
I'm curious to know from your perspective whether the decline in BIR interest is in part due to a growing awareness of the evils of colonization and the fact that younger generation no longer feels nostalgia for that period. Or is it mostly a culinary phenomenon?
I'm writing this from across the pond, so I truly have no idea, but I've always been curious.
That's a great question, and I think it's mostly culinary, because many young people know the word colonisation and have a vague sense that it was bad, but will not be able to say much about what...
That's a great question, and I think it's mostly culinary, because many young people know the word colonisation and have a vague sense that it was bad, but will not be able to say much about what England actually did.
We have so many food places now, offering such a wide range of reasonably priced food. People have got more options. And also (but this is pure guessing, take it with a pinch of salt) for some people, that "curry night" is associated with a particular heavy drinking Lad culture that they want no part of.
I think the variety and quality of food has improved. My parents, in their 60s, can still recall going to "the first Indian restaurant in the town" or "the first Chinese takeaway". At that time it...
I think the variety and quality of food has improved.
My parents, in their 60s, can still recall going to "the first Indian restaurant in the town" or "the first Chinese takeaway". At that time it was traditional British food only. I think a lost of people grew up with those two as the only non-british food available.
Now, as you say, you can easily get more authentic Indian and Chinese food along with Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, etc.
Thanks, that helped. You see it here too -- progress always seems to be in terms of people reacting to domestic culture, to whatever is right in front of them, not to foreign policy, war, or...
Thanks, that helped. You see it here too -- progress always seems to be in terms of people reacting to domestic culture, to whatever is right in front of them, not to foreign policy, war, or history. Too abstract maybe.
Gay marriage was legalized on the back of "Jim and John down the street are nice enough", not, idk, because it was the right thing to do.
Hey, though, if food is how you soften people's hearts, I'm all for it.
You know, I never thought about that. Of course it's true, and of course I should have, I just never did. I also went down a rabbit hole looking into precolonial food in south asia, but there's...
You know, I never thought about that. Of course it's true, and of course I should have, I just never did.
I also went down a rabbit hole looking into precolonial food in south asia, but there's only a smattering of sources on it. I gather that food varied by region/caste and that agriculture influenced diet. Big surprise. Details are apparently scarce. It's kind of sad to think that so much is lost.
I guess any two culinary cultures that come into contact, regardless of power differences, are going to enter each other's orbits.
I went into a YouTube rabbit hole last year on Ancient Indian recipes from the pre-Columbian exchange era. There is a decent amount of archaeological evidence for food from the Sangam era...
I went into a YouTube rabbit hole last year on Ancient Indian recipes from the pre-Columbian exchange era. There is a decent amount of archaeological evidence for food from the Sangam era apparently, but everything written on it will be in Tamil or Sanskrit. Tough to find in English.
Here's a few links though (1), (2), (3). (The last one is more about agricultural practices than food, but related).
Here are a couple of other old cookbooks from the Mughal era. https://a.co/d/0CYfKk5 https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2016/11/nasir-shahs-book-of-delights.html Unfortunately no full...
Here are a couple of other old cookbooks from the Mughal era.
Oh, awesome! I got a chance to watch all of the YouTube videos you linked this morning, and now this! I managed to find the first book you linked as a PDF. It has an entire English translation of...
Oh, awesome! I got a chance to watch all of the YouTube videos you linked this morning, and now this!
I managed to find the first book you linked as a PDF. It has an entire English translation of about 70 pages, a glossary of terms, and the original manuscript scans. Here's one:
Another kind of Ghiyath Shahi’s samosas: take well-cooked mince with the same amount of minced onion and flavour it with dried ginger (zanjabīl). Having ground a quarter of that with half a tūlcha of garlic, mix them all together. Grind three tūlchas of saffron in rosewater and mix it with the mince. Remove the pulp from aubergines and, having mixed it with the mince, stuff the samosas and fry them in ghee. They can be either of thin dry bread or of fine flour bread or of uncooked dough. Cook each of the three kinds of samosas, they are delicious and good.
Here's another!
Another recipe for navāla (snacks): put a quantity of flour with the white of a hen’s egg, knead it together and then knead it into the separated yolk and then cook it in a damp cloth over hot sticks. Use it as a stuffing for pūrī bread. Cook the pūrī bread well. Make a filling of almonds, cardamoms, potherbs, cloves and rosewater. Use this as stuffing as well as the hen’s egg. Fry it in ghee and sprinkle rosewater on it.
This is only anecdotal, but in Kerala which is a part of South West India that had heavy Portuguese and Dutch influence but also retained semi autonomous kingdoms there's a distinction I noticed...
This is only anecdotal, but in Kerala which is a part of South West India that had heavy Portuguese and Dutch influence but also retained semi autonomous kingdoms there's a distinction I noticed between the foodways of the ethnoreligious groups which tended to be associated with foreign trade (Jews, Muslims), fishing, plantation agriculture and tax farming (Christians of various stripes) and those of the groups more bound to the land (Hindu nobles and peasants). The latter tend to have more pepper-forward dishes (pepper being native to Kerala) while the former tend to use more chilli (which only arrived with the Columbian exchange).
Again, purely anecdotal, but I always saw it as an interesting example of how interactions between different groups affected cuisine.
I'm mostly just glad that second recipe you linked doesn't say to deseed the chillies. So many Indian recipe cookbooks for Whites say to deseed them which, I feel, is mollycoddling. I only deseed...
I'm mostly just glad that second recipe you linked doesn't say to deseed the chillies. So many Indian recipe cookbooks for Whites say to deseed them which, I feel, is mollycoddling.
I only deseed the chillies if I plan on giving the food to my kid, who is a literal baby.
Two of the best Indian restaurants I have been to (they were about 20 years ago) were ones that had very different menus to the usual fare. It was a bit of a lucky dip, but every dish was amazing.
Two of the best Indian restaurants I have been to (they were about 20 years ago) were ones that had very different menus to the usual fare. It was a bit of a lucky dip, but every dish was amazing.
In my opinion that's authentic Indian style. It has chillies and plenty of spicing, and they're using different dals. In England the recipes would usually say red split lentils, or masoor dal...
In my opinion that's authentic Indian style. It has chillies and plenty of spicing, and they're using different dals. In England the recipes would usually say red split lentils, or masoor dal (these are the same thing).
Strange article that doesn't mention price. I had to stop getting a fortnightly curry due to the rapidly increasing cost, I loved it but when the price jumped by close to £20 in the course of a...
Strange article that doesn't mention price.
I had to stop getting a fortnightly curry due to the rapidly increasing cost, I loved it but when the price jumped by close to £20 in the course of a year (for a family meal) it just became something that we recognised needed to be cut out.
Many takeaways seem to have become very focused on the premium end of the market too, this was sustainable for a long time but they've been hit hard by the inflationary crisis and I wouldn't be surprised if many either go under or have to change their focus.
I quite enjoy cooking takeaway style meals at home as well which has made this simpler, it has become a bit of a Saturday tradition to try and recreate them at a much lower cost.
The article mentions the difference between "BIR" (British Indian Restaurant) curries and food that you would find in India and I thought it'd be useful to provide some examples.
In England "Tarka Daal" is a common accompaniment. It's a mildly spiced, garlicky, lentil soup. How to make British Indian Restaurant style tarka dal There are no "hot" spices in this recipe. No chilli, no Kashmiri chilli powder. Here's another recipe that starts with half a cup of dry lentils (important, because sometimes they're cooking a huge amount of food and obviously that'll need more spicing.) He doesn't add any hot spices to the lentils as they're cooking. But he adds 4 dried red chillies, some green chilli (maybe one chopped?), and some chilli powder too. (This is a great recipe!) Restaurant style Dal Tadka Here they're making large quantities, but still, the pan isn't that large and they use a big ladle full of chilli powder. Masaledar Tadka dal.
My town has a population of about 100,000 people and there are at least 20 curry houses here. Some of them are trying the new style, but lots of them do feel stuck in a very rigid BIR model.
One of the problems is "familiarity with the menu". People tend to have a few dishes that the like and that they stick with, and breaking past that comfort is going to be a challenge. I'm not sure that's massively important though, because younger people haven't developed those habits and are more keen to experiment.
Going to the UK for uni as an ethnically Indian foreign student I was really surprised to find the fairly rigid spice/style gradation (korma, balti, madras, jalfrezi, vindaloo, bhuna).
Vindaloo was especially confusing since as a Malayalee, the dish refers to a specifically Portuguese influenced pork curry from Kerala and Goa which uses quite a bit of vinegar and, while chilli forward, in comparison to many other Malayalee dishes which tend to be pepper forward, is not particularly spicy and quite sweet.
Luckily in Leicester you could get excellent Punjabi food.
I moved from Leicester to Anglesey. All we have here on Anglesey are typical BIR style, and I really miss the much more varied Indian cuisine which was available in Leicester. Growing up in Leicester means you have eaten off the standard BIR menu 1000 times and it's natural that something a little bit different would be popular there, not to mention a massive population of people who want something more authentic to their own culture supporting restaurants that specialised in the cuisine of different regions of India rather than the generic "Indian" restaurant menu available all over the UK.
I love Indian food, but the standard 'British Indian' menu has grown stale.
Lived on Anglesey for a bit a few years ago and we only had 3 just eat restaurants in our location, was rough! The chinese was great though!
This was actually a bit of a culture shock when I moved.
It wasn't the easiest move, and it was done at short notice, during covid and I had to move a month ahead of my partner and all our stuff, so I only had what I could fit in one car load. After a tiring first day in my new rental I didn't have the energy to go shopping and limited cooking equipment. I opened just eat, where I was accustomed to seeing several hundred options.
There was one curry, no Chinese and a couple of chip shops. It sounds stupid and probably should have been obvious, but it really was a moment where I was taken aback with the realisation that this was going to be a very different place to live.
Love it now though, except the very limited choice of cuisine (and I still really need to improve my cooking of other cuisines)
I'm curious to know from your perspective whether the decline in BIR interest is in part due to a growing awareness of the evils of colonization and the fact that younger generation no longer feels nostalgia for that period. Or is it mostly a culinary phenomenon?
I'm writing this from across the pond, so I truly have no idea, but I've always been curious.
That's a great question, and I think it's mostly culinary, because many young people know the word colonisation and have a vague sense that it was bad, but will not be able to say much about what England actually did.
We have so many food places now, offering such a wide range of reasonably priced food. People have got more options. And also (but this is pure guessing, take it with a pinch of salt) for some people, that "curry night" is associated with a particular heavy drinking Lad culture that they want no part of.
I think the variety and quality of food has improved.
My parents, in their 60s, can still recall going to "the first Indian restaurant in the town" or "the first Chinese takeaway". At that time it was traditional British food only. I think a lost of people grew up with those two as the only non-british food available.
Now, as you say, you can easily get more authentic Indian and Chinese food along with Thai, Vietnamese, Mexican, etc.
Thanks, that helped. You see it here too -- progress always seems to be in terms of people reacting to domestic culture, to whatever is right in front of them, not to foreign policy, war, or history. Too abstract maybe.
Gay marriage was legalized on the back of "Jim and John down the street are nice enough", not, idk, because it was the right thing to do.
Hey, though, if food is how you soften people's hearts, I'm all for it.
The Indian culinary landscape is a direct consequence of colonization though. In spite of the evils involved, it's just the water we all swim in.
You know, I never thought about that. Of course it's true, and of course I should have, I just never did.
I also went down a rabbit hole looking into precolonial food in south asia, but there's only a smattering of sources on it. I gather that food varied by region/caste and that agriculture influenced diet. Big surprise. Details are apparently scarce. It's kind of sad to think that so much is lost.
I guess any two culinary cultures that come into contact, regardless of power differences, are going to enter each other's orbits.
I went into a YouTube rabbit hole last year on Ancient Indian recipes from the pre-Columbian exchange era. There is a decent amount of archaeological evidence for food from the Sangam era apparently, but everything written on it will be in Tamil or Sanskrit. Tough to find in English.
Here's a few links though (1), (2), (3). (The last one is more about agricultural practices than food, but related).
Here are a couple of other old cookbooks from the Mughal era.
https://a.co/d/0CYfKk5
https://blogs.bl.uk/asian-and-african/2016/11/nasir-shahs-book-of-delights.html
Unfortunately no full translations online I can find. Only excerpts.
Oh, awesome! I got a chance to watch all of the YouTube videos you linked this morning, and now this!
I managed to find the first book you linked as a PDF. It has an entire English translation of about 70 pages, a glossary of terms, and the original manuscript scans. Here's one:
Here's another!
I am getting hungry. Wow.
This is only anecdotal, but in Kerala which is a part of South West India that had heavy Portuguese and Dutch influence but also retained semi autonomous kingdoms there's a distinction I noticed between the foodways of the ethnoreligious groups which tended to be associated with foreign trade (Jews, Muslims), fishing, plantation agriculture and tax farming (Christians of various stripes) and those of the groups more bound to the land (Hindu nobles and peasants). The latter tend to have more pepper-forward dishes (pepper being native to Kerala) while the former tend to use more chilli (which only arrived with the Columbian exchange).
Again, purely anecdotal, but I always saw it as an interesting example of how interactions between different groups affected cuisine.
I'm mostly just glad that second recipe you linked doesn't say to deseed the chillies. So many Indian recipe cookbooks for Whites say to deseed them which, I feel, is mollycoddling.
I only deseed the chillies if I plan on giving the food to my kid, who is a literal baby.
Two of the best Indian restaurants I have been to (they were about 20 years ago) were ones that had very different menus to the usual fare. It was a bit of a lucky dip, but every dish was amazing.
This recipe is the one I usually make. We love it, but I'm not sure how authentic it is. Would you say it's Indian style or Westernized?
In my opinion that's authentic Indian style. It has chillies and plenty of spicing, and they're using different dals. In England the recipes would usually say red split lentils, or masoor dal (these are the same thing).
Strange article that doesn't mention price.
I had to stop getting a fortnightly curry due to the rapidly increasing cost, I loved it but when the price jumped by close to £20 in the course of a year (for a family meal) it just became something that we recognised needed to be cut out.
Many takeaways seem to have become very focused on the premium end of the market too, this was sustainable for a long time but they've been hit hard by the inflationary crisis and I wouldn't be surprised if many either go under or have to change their focus.
I quite enjoy cooking takeaway style meals at home as well which has made this simpler, it has become a bit of a Saturday tradition to try and recreate them at a much lower cost.