Currytural appropriation: The Victorian taste for curry

As the British presence in India increased, so did their taste for curry.

When you think of the typical cuisine of Victorian England, chances are you’re not thinking of tandoori chicken or peshwari naans. Boiled sweets, stodgy gruels and cakes made with suspect animal fats are what usually spring to mind. But this isn’t an entirely accurate picture of the culinary predilections of our notoriously prudish ancestors.

Victorian food culture was shaped through absorbing (or appropriating) the cuisines of its colonies, then creating something more suitable for the ‘refined’ (bland) British tastes. In the case of India, this is most apparent with curry.

Cooking up ‘curry’

There’s no one word for ‘curry’ in India. Not traditionally, anyway. Instead, different dishes were referred to by their specific names, such as korma, rogan josh and dopiaza. The word ‘curry’ comes from the Tamil kari, meaning ‘sauce’, and was adopted by Europeans to mean any South Asian dish served with a sauce or gravy. The Portuguese are credited with popularising the term after they ‘discovered’ the subcontinent and it became widely used in Britain after the East India Company became more established in the region throughout the 1600s.

From the beginning of the British presence in India, stories of exotic foods trickled back home. There were tales of carrees and currees - spicy stewed dishes of meat and rice. But it wasn’t until 1747 that the first recipe for curry appeared in English, ‘To Make a Currey the India Way’, by Hannah Glasse. It’s surprisingly recognisable today, calling for a combination of chicken, onions, butter, turmeric, ginger, pepper, cream, and lemon juice.

‘To make a currey the Indian way’ from The Art of Cookery, Hannah Glasse (1747)

The curry Queen

Curry’s popularity continued to grow throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By the time Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837, it was fairly readily available - though it was seen more as a novelty food. It was far more common to have your chef cook French cuisine than to have your house smelling of spices.

The Queen was no stranger to curry, having eaten it throughout her life, though it’s likely she was used to the Anglo-Indian varieties that had been popular since the 18th century. As Lizzie Collingham points out in The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World, ‘Victorian Britons took to adding a spoonful of curry powder to what was in effect a recipe for an English stew and ‘curried’ everything, from beef to periwinkles, sheep’s trotters and brain.’ 

An 1890 recipe, from the notebook of a Yorkshire servant, highlights this, when it combines meat, sour apples, milk, and dripping alongside an all-important spoonful of curry powder. As another author points out, ‘they did what any self-respecting British imperialist would do. They radically altered recipes and methods to suit their own English tastes’.

For queen and country

The Queen’s tastes began to change when she became Empress of India in 1877. After being given two Indian servants as a ‘gift from India’, she developed an interest in their culture. She even decorated one of the state rooms at Osborne House in an Indian style to reflect her new title and used it as a place to entertain European royalty.  

Steadily, the number of Indian servants employed within the royal Household increased, including the position of ‘Indian cook’. In 1887, the Queen wrote in her journal, ‘we had some excellent curry, made by one of my Indian servants’.

From the late 1880s onwards, the dining ledgers show that Victoria was regularly served dishes made by her Indian cook, and by 1897 they were part of the weekly menu. ‘Indian dish - Chicken curry’, was served most Sundays, while for Tuesday dinner an ‘Indian fish dish’ was prepared.

The Queen’s Swiss cook, Gabriel Tschumi, noted how the Indian cooks did everything from scratch, ‘For religious reasons, they could not use the meat which came to the kitchen in the ordinary way, and so they killed their own sheep and poultry for the curries. Nor would they use the curry powder in stock in the kitchens, though it was of the best imported kind, so a part of the household had to be given to them for their special use, and there they worked Indian-style, grinding their own curry powder between two large round stones.’

Sugar or spice?

While some have speculated that the Queen loved curries and ordered them cooked everyday, she actually only ever makes one reference to them in her diary - the time she called her meal ‘excellent’. As Annie Gray points out in The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria, ‘Britain traded with the entire world, and that was reflected in the variety of goods regularly ordered for the [royal] kitchens.’ This was also probably true for the food served to the Queen. As Empress of India, it’s hardly surprising to find curries on the menu.

While V ate a wide variety of food, she was most famous for her sweet tooth. Her wedding to Albert included a huge cake weighing nearly 300 lb (in 2016, a slice of this cake sold for £1,500 at auction). She also had weekly deliveries of pastries which included, ‘one box of biscuits, one box of drop tablets, one box of pralines, 16 chocolate sponges, 12 plain sponges, 16 fondant biscuits, one box of wafers containing two or three dozen fancy shapes, one and a half-dozen flat finger biscuits, one sponge cake, one princess cake and one rice cake’. Clearly Victoria was amazing.

Eating India

While we can’t be sure how Victoria felt about curries, it’s clear that a love for the dish (or for an Anglicised version, anyway) spread through the Victorian aristocracy, followed by the upper and then middle classes. Recipe books dedicated to curry, such as Henrietta Hervey’s 1895, Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home, became increasingly common and highlight Britain’s growing obsession with the subcontinent.

Britain’s interest in India and its cuisine was linked to a determination to hold onto what many saw as the Empire’s ‘jewel in the crown’. As historian Uma Narayan explains, ‘eating curry was in a sense eating India’. Or, in the words of historian Thomas Prasch, ‘What Britain conquers, it also eats.’  

Britain’s penchant for ‘eating India’ is still very much alive (though the vast majority of curry chefs in the UK actually have Bangladeshi heritage). The Indian takeaway is arguably as familiar to British palates as the roast dinner. Since the 1940s alone, around 12,000 curry houses have sprung up across the UK, employing 100,000 people and generating annual sales of £4.2bn. In fact, in 2013, it was reported that the average Brit will spend a staggering £30,000 on Indian cuisine in their lifetime. That’s a hell of a lot of jalfrezis.