Occasionally, I like to eat the kind of take-out Chinese food that comes with packets of duck sauce and bags of deep-fried noodle bits. “No self-respecting Chinese person would eat that,” I would think, the shame weighing heavier on the heart than grease from a spring roll. This guilt is instilled early in life. Dishes alien to my family’s region, cloying honeyed meats or poultry drenched in viscous goo, are meant to “pian lao wai”, or “fool the foreigner.” The remark, which my mother uses to characterize bastardized chinese cuisine, is not meant to disparage the western palate. It is more an admonition against embracing concepts imposed by outsiders over our own self-determined notions of culture.

It is this very problem that has the food authenticity police in a snit when it comes to curry’s relationship to Indian cuisine. In Curry: A Tale of Cooks & Conquerers, Lizzie Collingham explores the way in which the Mughals, the Portuguese and the British appropriated the food of India and, as conquerors, shaped the global perception of Indian cuisine. The very concept of Indian cuisine is problematic, just as it would be to describe a single unified European cuisine. Distinct regional differences mean that food prepared by a Gujarati may be unrecognizable to a Punjabi, for example.

To this day, our perceptions of Indian cuisine are defined by classifications imposed by conquerors and outsiders. Curry, for example, is only Indian insofar as it describes spices commonly used in regional cuisines of the Indian subcontinent. The term curry, derived from the Tamil term ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce, is a catch-all for generic spices—turmeric, ginger, nutmeg, cardamom, coriander, cloves, and pepper—crushed into clarified butter, ghee, to make a pasty gravy. Few cultures would describe their own cuisine in such nebulous terms. “We eat sauce.”

Collingham begins this book with chicken tikka masala, which holds the dubious distinction as the national dish of Great Britain. This dish was the brainchild of an Indian chef in Britain who was responding to a customer complaint that chicken tikka was dry:

When the chef whipped together a can of Campbell’s tomato soup, some cream, and a few spices to provide a can of gravy for the offending chicken he produced a mongrel dish of which, to their shame, Britons now eat at least 18 tons a week. (Collingham, p2).

It is fun to sneer at British eating habits. However, using such an approach to reframe popular perceptions of Indian food is unsatisfying. Though Collingham begins from the viewpoint of authenticity, she quickly dismisses its relevance since standards of authenticity are by nature subjective and governed by personal/family experience. Instead, she embarks on a comprehensive exploration of the foreign occupations and the intricate cultural undercurrents that synthesized some of the most commonly recognized form of Indian cuisine: Biryani, Rogan Josh, Vindaloo, Korma, Curry, and Chai. Particularly intriguing is the class implications of eating practices in Hinduism. Pakka and Kacca are concepts of purification attained through refined and coarse food properties. Equally compelling is the discussion on the status of meat. During both the Mughal and the British occupation are, love of roast meat were at odds with vegetarianism common in parts of the country.

The best chapters of the book relate to the development and the export of curry. It describes the manner in which curry became an agglomeration of different aspects of cookery from all regions of India (comes with recipes). We can argue that curry is the perfect example of British imperialist arrogance. In the zeal to produce a pan-Indian cuisine, they misunderstood the complexities of other cultures, willfully overlooking nuances of multiple culinary paradigms.

Collingham’s revision Indian food history may signal a greater reexamination of our notions of food culture and the emergence of a new kind of Indian restaurant. Chef Suvir Saran opened an upscale New York restaurant last year showcasing the home-cooking he grew up with in New Delhi. The restaurant does not serve curry.

“The greasy curries that nobody eats at home in India were ubiquitous," he says. He volunteered advice to restaurateurs, went into kitchens to meet chefs and found out why the food was so lousy. "They added butter and cream to everything because a bad sauce will improve with fat," he says. "But it's not authentic--not how Indians cook at home.” (Vibhuti Patel, Newsweek,26 September 2005)

New York Times Review of Collingham's Book