Curry

Eating, Reading, and Race

Naben Ruthnum

• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781552453513
• eBook ISBN: 9781770565234
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Literary Essays

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.

Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this hilarious and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations.By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own background, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavour calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

Eating

Like the English language, curry is a colonial endpoint: everything ended up in it, and it remains infinitely changeable, even as its complex colonial roots became disguised as homeland authenticity. The tikka masala–inventing cooks at Indian restaurants in the 1970s gave Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants a tasteable identity – a primarily British public encountered these people from the saucy, spicy dishes that would seem out of place in the homeland kitchens of these émigré chefs. What the Brits were really eating was the improvisations of various chefs. Tikka masala’s (disputed) origin: a Pakistani restaurateur in Glasgow added some tomato sauce to the meal of a bus driver who was complaining that his food was dry. Without abandoning the spices on the rack and the colonially informed cuisine they grew up with, the immigrant cooks of Great Britain shaped a cuisine that is definitive of eating out, and carry-out, in the U.K.

Even the most commonly understood characteristic of curry came to be by way of the machinations of international trade and colonialism. Curry has many immutable qualities, but no definition of the dish can escape heat, or at the very least the potential for heat. This central characteristic is what prompts diners to say, ‘It’s not too hot, is it?’ or ‘Make it actually hot, not just medium, I can take it,’ to bored waiters in Indian restaurants all over the world. Though it is a truly difficult fact for many Indians and children of Indian immigrants to acknowledge, chilies are not native to India at all – they were actually brought to the subcontinent from the Caribbean in the fifteenth century, by way of the trade-savvy, empire-hungry Portuguese.

It’s slightly identity-shaking to me – and perhaps to any brown person who wasn’t previously aware of the history – to find out that chilies were planted on our shores by some spice-route jagoff. Lizzie Collingham’s superb 2005 book Curry (subtitled A Biography in the U.K. and A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors in North America) is committed to drawing out the historical truths that shaped the elusive identity of curry. Indian recipes, including ones in the vast curry family, have been adapted or altered to suit rulers, visitors, and colonial intruders for hundreds of years – with pulao rice arising from Persian pillau rice, and with creams and spices being increased or decreased in various dishes to suit the increasingly adventurous palates of British Raj occupiers. The Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani immigrant cooks in 1970s England who added tinned tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and chili to tandoor-forged chicken to make tikka masala weren’t undoing centuries of tradition: they were innovating and adapting a living cuisine that has sustained itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by absorbing them. The inauthenticity of curry is its greatest claim to its position as a reflection of global history and the present politics of hunger, eating, and identity.

As the resource-leeching rule of the British began to wane in India, a parallel distaste for food from India took place in the U.K. Curries, exotic to some Brits and a powerful reminder of youth and childhood to thousands of whites who’d grown up or spent their career years working for the Empire abroad, fell out of fashion for a while. Collingham points to a post-Victorian backlash against curry due to its supposed unsuitability to middle-class British stomachs and the powerful smells attendant on its preparation. But curry had threaded as deeply into England as the English language had reached into the colonies. The influx of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani immigrants of the mid-twentieth century made the ingrained British taste for a food that had been part of their own national history impossible to ignore, and curry made its comeback. ‘By 1970 there were two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain,’ Collingham writes. This number has since climbed to about 12,000, with estimated sales of £4.2 billion.

The food served in these establishments as late-twentieth-century U.K. Indian cuisine took shape often had little to do with what the cooks ate at home. For their children, this wasn’t the case. In an interview Collingham quotes, landmark British restaurateur Haji Shirajul Islam discusses how he didn’t eat the curries his restaurants prepared, but that his son’s palate quickly took a British turn: ‘When he goes to the restaurant he eats Madras – hot one … Me I always eat in the house. When I offer him food he eats it, but he says it’s not tasty like restaurant food, because he’s the other way round now.’ As Lizzie Collingham concludes: ‘For generations of British customers, and even second-generation Indians, the vindaloos and dhansaks, tarka dhals and Bombay potatoes, are Indian food.’

As a first-generation Mauritian-Canadian, eating salmon and chicken curry and smelling it as it cooked were the earliest markers of my difference growing up, though I had to go outside and make white friends to truly find that out. In Kelowna, where I spent my childhood and teen years, I was twice literally asked what colour my blood was in a friendly, genuinely curious tone. Even as a child, I noticed the noticing, the whipped-around heads at the melanin flood my family represented when we entered any public space in 1980s Kelowna. Food supplies were also a problem: key ingredients for curry and other Mauritian meals had to be picked up on weekend missions to Vancouver, the nearest city with a significant population of South Asian transplants. For a few years, garam masala was shipped directly to us from Mauritian family in packages that leaked a powerful odour no matter how well they’d been wrapped. Curry travels along with the diaspora, continuing the long trip of its evolving existence. The range of variations on curry dishes just across the subcontinent, leaving out islands like Mauritius and Guyana, or significant outposts of diasporic Indians such as South Africa, is staggering. I can still go to an Indian restaurant and taste something made with ingredients that are entirely Indian but quite foreign to me. I had chicken chettinad and tasted the cinnamony tree-lichen kalpasi just a few months ago. It makes perfect sense that I’m unfamiliar with many Indian dishes: I learned them all from restaurants and books over here. From an early age, my parents made me aware that there were minor and major differences between Mauritian and Indian food, even if they didn’t provide a detailed explanation. Something to do with ginger and the Chinese population on the island, the story would start, before deviating into an anecdote about Chan, the man who ran the corner grocery on the street where my father grew up. Curry stories have a propensity for tipping into the nostalgic.

Curry is not a cliché. Well, maybe it is. The unifying notion of curry as an authentic, homeland-defining collection of dishes that form a cultural touchstone for diasporic brown folks is a cliché, in the same way food-based bonds between people from any culture who find themselves in a new land is a cliché. But curry can’t be trapped. If you push through the cliché, you arrive at a surprising truth: the history of this ever-inauthentic mass of dishes is a close parallel to the formation of South Asian diasporic identity, which is as much of a blend of conflicting cultural messages forced into coherence as Indian cuisine itself.

Then again, the entire category of food writing comes with built-in nostalgia, a resurrection of remembered meals that, at its best, creates hunger to recreate that experience. When the topic, or the writer, is associated with a certain ethnic background, that act of nostalgia is positioned as a cultural act of looking-back. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik splits the food-literature genre into two categories:

There are two schools of good writing about food: the mock epic and the mystical microcosmic. The mock epic (A. J. Liebling, Calvin Trillin, the French writer Robert Courtine, and any good restaurant critic) is essentially comic and treats the small ambitions of the greedy eater as though they were big and noble, spoofing the idea of the heroic while raising the minor subject to at least temporary greatness. The mystical microcosmic, of which Elizabeth David and M. F. K. Fisher are the masters, is essentially poetic, and turns every remembered recipe into a meditation on hunger and the transience of its fulfillment.

Food writing is also memoir, at least outside the confines of the newspaper restaurant review. The alimental is elemental to a life story. M. F. K. Fisher’s rapturous descriptions of meals in France are also the story of an adventurous American woman abroad, eating, writing, and living in quaint circumstances with a husband or between marriages. A great portion of Fisher’s and Elizabeth David’s writing deals with food and food experiences in France and continental Europe, an ongoing suggestion to readers that real food was something that existed elsewhere, not in the country of the writer’s origin (America and England, respectively). Fisher’s adventurous trip to isolated restaurants in Burgundy, where she’s served pickled herring that is ‘mild, pungent, meaty as fresh nuts,’ and trout served au bleu, gutted and cooked half-alive in bouillon, ‘agonizingly curled on a platter,’ is as much about the hidden chef and the exuberant server, the sense of being alone and given a unique gift in a foreign land, as it is about the food, which Fisher actually describes in rather quick little clauses, compared to the considerable time given to describing the ‘mad waitress,’ ‘fanatical about food like a medieval woman possessed by the devil,’ and her own sensations of hunger, surfeit, determination, and even fear in the face of an epic meal. There are certainly exceptions to this questing-in-a-foreign-land in each writer’s oeuvre, from Fisher’s paean to Old Mary the cook’s peach pie at the family’s California ranch, to David’s English Bread and Yeast Cookery. But Fisher’s rapturous descriptions of French meals and life and David’s landmark recipe books Mediterranean Food and French Provincial Cooking established their reputations and carried a clear message: the truest experiences of eating are out there, là-bas, and the amateur cook’s hopeless task is to try to create the real thing at home.

In the case of Elizabeth David’s early books and columns, the tasks assigned by the recipes were actually impossible fantasies – many of the ingredients her recipes required, like lemons and eggplant, were near-impossible to obtain in rationed Britain. This narrative of the real, right thing being elsewhere, particularly Continental Europe, has echoed through the biographies and restaurants of many American chefs, even in decades where French cuisine fell slightly out of fashion on the other side of the Atlantic. Both Anthony Bourdain in Kitchen Confidential and Bill Buford in his chronicle of life in Mario Batali’s kitchen, Heat, describe chefs turning away from the complexities of French cuisine to the purity of Italian regional cuisine, made properly (which, to Batali, meant made by chefs who had trained in Italy with real Italian cooks with access to old-world knowledge). The supposed cleansing effect that this turn to the authenticity of another country may not have changed American haute cuisine forever, but it certainly impacted the ‘story’ of these particular chefs, bringing notoriety to their cuisine and personas.

When a food writer is a South Asian immigrant, or even a few generational steps from the plane or boat, another ripple enters. One of the conventions of diasporic food writing dictates that the writer’s identity and self-discovery are implicitly linked to a tracing-back of culinary roots, a finding-out of who he or she really is in the rich smell of a Keralan masala finally nailed. That’s the extra dimension to writing about curry and other ethnic foods: beyond meditating on hunger and fulfillment, writing about curry and India and the real food of one’s ancestors becomes a meditation on personal and familial identity, and its relationship to the place where one grew up, or where one was wrested away from. The inability of the writer to reproduce his or her mother’s aloo gobi often becomes, as if by default, a metaphor for the impossibility of full communication between generations – a metaphor so overwrought it’s now as codified and recognizable as a Noh mask.

In ‘The Long Way Home,’ a 2004 essay for the New Yorker, Pulitzer Prize–winning Indian-American novelist Jhumpa Lahiri contributes to this form of writing that connects family, roots, secrets, and the lost unknowables of the past incarnated in particular delicious dishes. In Lahiri’s case, her mother had learned to cook by witnessing and participating in her own mother’s cooking in Calcutta, learning lessons that she carried to America by, for example, getting ‘down on the floor to pound turmeric or chilies on a massive grinding stone.’ Lahiri’s mother here joins a line of mothers in this food-writing tradition. Like so many before her, she kindly evades sharing their recipes, never records or verbally details them: ‘To this day, if friends ask how she made a particular dish, she cryptically replies, “It’s nothing, really, you simply take all the ingredients and put them in the pot.”’ This reluctance to share methods is perhaps true of many mothers, and extremely common in these nostalgic essays and stories. My mother, thankfully, will give up any recipe, with detailed directions. Lahiri ends up learning her Indian-cooking techniques from a cookbook by Madhur Jaffrey, doyenne of subcontinental cookery books and TV since the early 1970s. In the end, her mother is quietly impressed, taking a photo of the spread that Lahiri and her sister make for their parents’ thirtieth anniversary.

In 2016, Scaachi Koul contributed to the genre with an essay for BuzzFeed on learning how to cook the dishes of her childhood as an adult, ‘There’s No Recipe for Growing Up’:

My mom had watched my grandmother cook for years, knew her languages, knew how to pleat a sari or mutter a Kashmiri insult (‘Thrat’) or throw a wedding for her son, 25 years after she moved away. I don’t have any of these secrets, because I was born in North America and raised around white people in a family that wanted to integrate. So it felt important to at least try to remember how my own mom did things.

Late last week, I called my mom to get a refresher on a few of her recipes. I wanted to make rogan josh, aloo gobi (potatoes and cauliflower), chicken biryani (chicken and rice), and paneer with palak (spinach). But my mom, like so many Indian mothers I know, has always avoided giving me complete recipes.

Mothers are an important and authentic part of the curry genre, both cooked and written: not only a source of accessible, cross-cultural nostalgia, but a reminder that there are domestic, comforting aspects to exoticism. The parental link to the homeland, especially for writers with immigrant parents who themselves were born in the West, or who moved to the West at such a young age that their grasp on the old country remains light, questioned by brown people who dismiss their experiences or white people who say, ‘But you seem so white,’ can also have a sinister, minimizing aspect. If mothers are baggaged with the symbolic weight of a motherland and the author’s distance from this place and identity, they sometimes aren’t given much room of their own to be intact characters themselves. Mothers are permitted to be mysterious or generous in this system of symbolism, but in Lahiri’s essay, her mother’s pattern of selective withholding becomes her primary trait. And Lahiri, the writer, is burdened with mastering the domestic skill of cooking in order to achieve an understanding and connection with her mother. In Koul’s piece, being able to cook her mother’s food comes to stand in for her need for her mother’s love and presence: Koul manages to pull off cooking a solid meal, catching the intangible scents of her mother’s kitchen while she prepares it, but the meal ‘wasn’t as good because my food, as surprisingly palatable as it was, didn’t include my mom hovering over me with a wooden spoon.’ For these writers, their personal relationships with their mothers overwhelms the symbolic stand-in of mother for motherland, of food and the ability to prepare it properly as a marker of authenticity: but for many readers, this may not be the case – the mother on the page remains a symbolic stand-in for authenticity lost, despite the writer’s labour to own the metaphor, to make it personal.

In part, these two pieces reflect ways I’ve found myself thinking about my race and family, and even writing about these matters … at least until I stop myself out of fear that I’m replicating an essay that already exists. That this treatment of a relationship between food, family bonds, and a fraying connection to the homeland appears frequently in essays and novels by diasporic South Asians doesn’t invalidate it. An oft-repeated story isn’t a false one: experiences and dishes like the ones described by Koul and Lahiri take place in the kitchens of brown undergraduates worldwide. The two essays above hit many of the same points about authenticity, love, and the unknowability of one’s parents, but stylistically they are distinct to their authors, and there is no sense that the details are anything but true, lived experience. I mean, I’ve had a bunch of those experiences, too: a recipe is given over the phone, but a half pound of burnt onions and candied-walnuts-subbing-for-almond-slivers later, there’s a stovetop of muck that has nothing to do with home, comfort, or good food. Just failure, distance, a sense that something essential has been lost. This is authentic, isn’t it? It’s also relatable, to readers from any number of immigrant backgrounds. So why shouldn’t it be written about?

It should be, of course. Stories beget similar stories, and they don’t become lies as a result. But endless encounters with one narrative – one that tells us that truth and colonialism are embedded in these family recipes and our failures to cook them – make me wonder why I keep reading this particular story over and over again, and why white and South Asian publics alike embrace it. South Asian food came to major prominence in the West with the explosion of Indian restaurants in the U.K., and the formative wave of South Asian diasporic writers followed soon afterward. When genres and forms have been around for long enough, there comes a point when they risk calcifying: becoming the same stories. This narrative thread, this way of thinking about curry, is one iteration of what Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie recently called ‘the single story,’ one over-arching narrative that ‘creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story.’

Thinking about and writing about a food as culturally complex as curry as though it were a marker of an authentic past that is now lost, or a signifier of a broken bond between generations due to geographical dislocation, does a major disservice to how delicious curry is, and to how particular a South Asian diasporic experience can be.

Let me tell you about two personal curries of note. The logic of this genre dictates that if I describe a beloved dish, I’ll be describing myself, achieving insight into family bonds, reaching back through a sense of the past into a concrete known this-much-is-true exchanged in knowing looks over bites of curry and rice. If it doesn’t work out, you’ll at least emerge with an excellent, usable recipe.

First, the chicken curry that I make a few times a month, from a now-freehanded recipe liberally adopted from Vikram Vij’s first cookbook, modified by my own tendency to favour coriander and turmeric. Vij built his small, fusion-friendly Indian restaurant in Vancouver into a national brand, eventually opening a wallet-friendly companion restaurant, a fleet of cookbooks and frozen meals, and standing in judgment on Canada’s version of the entrepreneurial pitching show Dragons’ Den. In the restaurant’s first cookbook, writte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Introduction
• Eating
• Reading
• Race
• Coda
• Works Cited
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• About the Exploded Views Series