Book Review #83: Curry

[jethrien]

Title: Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors
Author: Lizzie Collingham
Genre: Culinary history
Thingummies: 3.5

Synopsis: A walkthrough of India's culinary history, showing how the political and military history of the subcontinent determined its cuisine.

Thoughts: Some history books do not so much alter your worldview as fill your head with a plethora of interesting trivia, some of which you will spout at your friends for a few days, and most of which will disappear in a month or two. Regrettably, I think most of the interesting factoids I've learned from this book are doomed to such a fate.

The book is a little disjointed--I often felt as if the author was on the verge of a grand unifying theory but could not quite wrap her arms around it. Instead, it stumbles from one era to the next. Far more of the book had to do with European influences than I had expected; however, the Europeans started having a strong effect on the cuisine far earlier than I'd realized, so I suppose that's fair.

Some interesting, useless factoids I have learned:

- Chili peppers are native to the Americas and were introduced to Asia by the Portugeuse. It was the discovery of scotch bonnet chilis that convinced Columbus he'd found the Indies--he thought they were the source of black pepper, an entirely different plant native to India. Trinidad has adaEpted curries from Indian immigrants to use their native scotch bonnets instead of some of the other chili varieties used in India, bringing the transfer full circle.

- British food used to be quite spicy--the Middle Ages featured enormous quantities of cinnamon, black pepper, and other spices, as well as sweets mixed with savories. The rise in prestige of French cooking and the pallid imitation of it led to the bland-i-fication of British cooking. Early British officers and merchants in India embraced Indian cooking--it wasn't until the rise of middle class values and of canning that they switched to preferring socially prestigious but wretched tinned British imports to native dishes. So British cooking wasn't always that wretched--social snobbery made it so, despite the best efforts of the world to help them.

- The word "factory" comes from the warehouses of British textile agents, or factors.

- Most of the "Indian" restaurateurs (perhaps as many as 90%) are actually Bangladeshi, from one specific reason, due to some peculiarities of immigration laws and labor shortages. Most of the food we're accustomed to thinking of as "Indian" is a Britishized version of Mughlai cooking. But given the incredible cross-pollination of cultures, identifying an "authentic" Indian cuisine is basically impossible. It's always been adapted and tampered with by foreigners and conquerors.

Lots of other fun facts abound. Also, quite a lot of recipes, which are helpful in charting some of the changing styles, but I doubt will result in many meals. (Some of the ingredients sound rather hard to come by outside of India, while some of the instructions or measurements, especially of older recipes, are rather archaic and difficult to understand.)

It would help a great deal if you go into the book with at least a framework of Indian history in mind. In the times and places which I was already familiar with, I had a much easier time following what was going on than those with which I was less familiar.

Comments

[ivy03.livejournal.com]

Well, I was mostly surprised to find the dish I ordered, that I thought was pork and apples, was actually pork shaped like apples. No actual fruit. This is the problem of ordering off a menu in a foreign language. Even if you know some nouns, you miss the subtleties.