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Abstract
From its humble origin of pepper water, mulligatawny soup seems to have travelled around the globe, and across time. The rise and fall of the popularity of mulligatawny, its adoption and rejection, its asynchronous though linked histories in Britain and in India, serve as the barometerfor measuring British attitudes towards India. It allows us to think about histories of cultural exchange and reveals the linkages between food, identity and power. This paper looks at the creation of this soup in the British-Indian Empire. It explains its origins and popularity, and its current ubiquitous presence on menus in Indian restaurants. The history of this soup is a story of class struggle at the level of the dinner table and it is a story, inevitably, about gender.
... Pork was used in its traditional preparation but the alternative versions use beef, mutton, prawns, chicken, and vegetables (Peters- Jones, 2015). The cuisine that emerged due to British influence on Indian cuisine during British raj is termed as 'Anglo-Indian cuisine' (Davidson, 2014 (Roy, 2010). Among other established Anglo-Indian dishes is chutney, salted beef tongue, ball curry and fish rissoles. ...
This PhD thesis explores Indian cuisine as a significant tourist attraction through the perspectives of various stakeholders, including hotels, restaurants, and foreign tourists. The study aims to uncover the differing perceptions among these groups, focusing on motivational factors, culinary challenges, and experiences. Additionally, it examines the shift in foreign tourists' perceptions of Indian cuisine before and after they sample Indian food items. By analyzing these perspectives, the research provides insights into how Indian cuisine contributes to the tourism industry and suggests ways to enhance culinary tourism, addressing stakeholders' needs and improving tourists' experiences.
... 5 Aludiendo a esta anécdota, Madhumita Roy comenta sobre la ironía que la rodea. En Madrás (Chennai), India, los ingleses tomaban mulligatawny después de la comida como un digestivo y la sopa era famosa por curar "severos dolores de cabeza" (Roy, 2010). ...
In September 1600, Queen Elizabeth and London are made to believe that the East India Company will change England's fortunes forever. With William Shakespeare's death, the heart of Albion starts throbbing with four centuries of an extraordinary Indian settlement that Arup K. Chatterjee christens as Typogravia. In five acts that follow, we are taken past the churches destroyed by the fire of Pudding Lane; the late eighteenth-century curry houses in Mayfair and Marylebone; and the coming of Indian lascars, ayahs, delegates, students and lawyers in London. From the baptism of Peter Pope (in the year Shakespeare died) to the death of Catherine of Bengal; the chronicles of Joseph Emin, Abu Taleb and Mirza Ihtishamuddin to Sake Dean Mahomet's Hindoostane Coffee House; Gandhi's experiments in Holborn to the recovery of the lost manuscript of Tagore's Gitanjali in Baker Street; Jinnah's trysts with Shakespeare to Nehru's duels with destiny; Princess Sophia's defiance of the royalty to Anand establishing the Progressive Writers' Association in Soho; Aurobindo Ghose's Victorian idylls to Subhas Chandra Bose's interwar days; the four Indian politicians who sat at Westminster to the blood pacts for Pakistan; India in the shockwaves at Whitehall to India in the radiowaves at the BBC; the intrigues of India House and India League to hundreds of East Bengali restaurateurs seasoning curries and kebabs around Brick Lane… Indians in London is a scintillating adventure across the Thames, the Embankment, the Southwarks, Bloomsburys, Kensingtons, Piccadillys, Wembleys and Brick Lanes that saw a nation-a cultural, historical and literary revolution that redefined London over half a millennium of Indian migrations-reborn as independent India.
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.
This volume offers a study of food, cooking and cuisine in different societies and cultures over different periods of time. It highlights the intimate connections of food, identity, gender, power, personhood and national culture, and also the intricate combination of ingredients, ideas, ideologies and imagination that go into the representation of food and cuisine. Tracking such blends in different societies and continents developed from trans-cultural flows of goods and peoples, colonial encounters, adventure and adaptation, and change in attitude and taste, Cooking Cultures makes a novel argument about convergent histories of the globe brought about by food and cooking.
This essay introduces food and cooking as elements significant to the understanding of historical processes and concept categories such as the ‘modern’. It draws upon crisscrossing tales of cooking and cuisine from Bengal and other parts of India and Britain between the late nineteenth and twenty first centuries to underscore hybridization and innovation as constant, enduring, and intrinsic components not just of food and cooking but also of human lives and encounters in general. This allows it to raise questions about the novelty and rupture on which the ‘modern’ is supposed to be based. Exploring the centrality of food, cooking, and taste in the shaping of personhood, identity and belonging, status and class, and examining how the claims of novelty and distinction often besets the modern with anxieties and desire, this chapter calls for a reconsideration of concept-categories and a scrutiny of the ‘authentic’ and ‘pure’ to make a case for identities poised on the indeterminate and impure.
In 1937 in Jerash, Transjordan, Margaret Murray gave Gerald Lankester Harding recipes for meat curry and dahl. This article briefly traces each archaeologist’s personal and professional trajectory as they moved between Britain and various imperial outposts, and situates the recipes within the complex contexts of their histories. The recipes, staples of Anglo-Indian cuisine, take on new meaning as symbols of the hybridity of archaeological identity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Despite being called ‘Indian restaurants’, the family-run curry houses that are characteristic of high streets in Britain are primarily run by Bangladeshi and Pakistani migrants. This article links the evolution of these restaurants in Britain to colonial history, migration after Independence and contemporary political changes. It analyses the popularity of curry houses alongside the continuing racism meted out to the wait staff and patrons by white Britons in the context of colonial history, migration patterns and the changing industrial fortunes of India and Britain in the post-World War II era. The emergence of wealthy and highly-credentialed Indians and British-born Asians has led to the rise of upmarket eateries and to a sharp bifurcation in diasporic communities.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, a spate of cookbooks
and household management guides appeared that were intended to assist
British women in running their households in India. In this article, the
author argues that these texts constructed a new approach to imperial
domesticity. Rather than mimicking the labor-intensive approach to
household management common in the metropole, British women in India
adopted a "hands-off" approach to housekeeping that allowed them to devote
their attentions to other pursuits, including the work of empire.
OVER THE COURSE OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY, England saw the publication of numerous social instruction handbooks, household manuals, cookery books, and restaurant guides focusing on the proper methods for dining. These dining handbooks provide a systematic account of the most minute details for both attending and hosting a dinner party, including such information as how to word the invitations, ornament the table, order the courses, or arrange guests according to precedence. To the extent that formal dining becomes standardized in the conduct literature, a dining taxonomy begins to emerge–a classificatory system whereby formerly idiosyncratic aspects of this social experience are codified, or reduced to a code, and routinized, or rendered routine. While the content of handbooks (the social conventions) is arranged into a taxonomy, something more interesting can be seen to appear as well: conventions for the dining taxonomy itself. That is, within the large body of Victorian dining handbooks, there is not only a striking repetition of content from one handbook to the next, but also a repetition of narrative styles, patterns, and devices that imply that the procedures under discussion are universal phenomena, divorced from human agency, interpretation, and variable social circumstances. In other words, these handbooks render the conventions natural.
IN OCTOBER 1856, the wife of the Governor General of India noted her satisfaction with recent changes at Government House in Calcutta: “I believe it would look rather nice even as an English country-house, so marvelously is it improved by 450 yards of rose-chintz, a great many arm-chairs, small round tables, drawings etc., and flowerpots in number” (Allen 34). Having arrived in Calcutta in February of that year, Lady Charlotte Canning wasted no time in transporting Victorian upper-class domestic style to a key spot on Britain’s nineteenth-century imperial map. As several recent examinations of the role of Victorian women in the work of empire have shown us, although Lady Canning’s lavish transformation of colonized space into something resembling a Derbyshire drawing-room could not be matched by lower-ranked Englishwomen who accompanied their military and civilian husbands to outposts of empire — 450 yards is a lot of chintz and the Queen had personally despatched some Royal family portraits to Calcutta to assist Lady Canning in her interior decoration — they too did their English domesticating bit. Among other things, these women grew pansies in Simla, served afternoon tea in Ceylon, and arranged croquet parties in Jamaica. They were also faced with less pleasant tasks, as one learns from the memoirs of Harriet Tytler, who accompanied her husband on various military postings in India during the 1840s and 50s. Tytler buried several children, dead of non-treatable illnesses, endured the killing climate of Dacca, and survived the siege of Delhi in 1857.