British curry: A dish that defines Queen Elizabeth’s reign?

Alice Grahame still remembers the excitement of eating her first curry as a child, brought back home by her father in thin brown oily bags.

“The flavors were out of this world. There’s something about the smell of spices that gets you stimulated,” says the Londoner, a self-confessed aficionado of Indian food.

Her early experience of curry is commonplace among Britons: going to a takeaway for unattainable spices, or else suffering her mother’s “off the shelf, ready-made jars” of curry sauce.

Nowadays, her spice cupboard is varied with curry regularly cooked at home, ever since a Pakistani friend during her university years taught her the “proper way” of cooking curry and pilau rice.

Ms. Grahame’s trajectory reflects the absorption of new foods – and the societal changes – during Britain’s transition from global empire to postcolonialism, under the 70-year reign of Queen Elizabeth II, now being celebrated in her Platinum Jubilee. One of the key changes during the era is represented by curry, now considered a quintessential national cuisine molded both by English ideas and immigrant diasporas.

“It’s seen in the same breath as fish and chips was,” says food historian and author Lizzie Collingham, who wrote “Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors.” “I’m cautious about labels, but it captures people’s imagination.”

A colonial mix

Elizabeth’s glittering coronation in 1953 ushered in a new era of change almost immediately, with a record 20 million people on television tuning in to see it. The occasion was also marked with the invention of “coronation chicken,” a creamy curry dish served up to feed foreign dignitaries.

Ingredients remained limited, despite wartime rationing coming to an end. Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume created coronation chicken using poached chicken, chopped onions, curry powder, tomato puree, pepper, red wine, and lemon juice.

The recipe, completed with mayonnaise, lightly whipped cream, and dried apricots (or frequently in later variations, mango chutney), made its way into the British gastronomic classic “The Constance Spry Cookery Book” and has since become a classic.

Though coronation chicken is “revolting” to Dr. Collingham, it stands as a marker between the end of the British Empire and an incoming era of postcolonial immigration under the queen’s long reign. 

“It comes from Anglo-Indian cuisine, which is a weird mix. The British in India during the 19th century loved mango chutney. In India you have different relishes in different regions, perhaps sprinkling coconut on curries or adding sultanas. The British, however, would sprinkle all of them together,” she says.

Coronation chicken was an oddity, however, in the postwar period. Curry had fallen out of favor, due to kitchens moving out of basements with the loss of servants and curry cooking being deemed as “quite smelly.”

Curry, through a Victorian lens

British upper classes had dined on curry as far back as the 1600s, but it disappeared in the late 17th century. When Britain grasped control of Bengal via the East India Company, curry reappeared on British tables both at home and abroad.

Over time, Britons adapted versions of their subjects’ dishes suited to their own taste, inventing a standardized curry powder.

“They don’t really understand the sophisticated use of spices in India, too tricky to bring home to Britain – so they simplify it,” says Dr. Collingham. “The Victorians really felt that they made Indian food their own. It was their food, part of the nation. You’ll find Victorian cookery writers saying it was a national British food.”

Evidence of this Anglo-Indian evolution is found on page 77 of a recipe book from 1840, handwritten by a domestic servant by the name of Eleanor Grantham in East Yorkshire in northern England.

Instead of oil, she recommends cooking with beef dripping to create an imitation of curry that Sam Bartle, collections officer at the East Riding Archive, calls “horrible, but edible.”

Ms. Grantham’s curry recipe uses sour apples, milk, sultanas, and, most importantly, curry powder “widely available because of colonial trade links,” says the archivist. “It’s about fusing seasonal ingredients with Indian ingredients, and the start of curry as associated with Britain.”

The arrival of modern curry

Though much has changed since Ms. Grantham’s East Yorkshire recipe, curry continues to play a pivotal role in social life – but now driven by chefs of immigrant origin. East Yorkshire is famous for its “Balti curry” in Bradford, a former industrial city with a high concentration of curry houses largely run by Pakistani and Indian migrants, who make up almost a quarter of Bradford’s population.

But it is the impact of Bangladeshi immigration into Britain during the 1960s, just the second decade of the queen’s reign, that historians credit with popularizing curry as we know it today.

“A food revolution goes hand in hand with immigration in the second and third decade of the queen’s reign,” says Dr. Collingham. “Bangladeshi seamen often worked unpleasant jobs on steamship boiler rooms, and so jumped ship to find work in the U.K.”

Many found jobs in catering, washing plates, before buying bombed-out fish and chips shops and adapting the English dish with curry sauce.

By the 1970s, Bangladeshis pioneered the modern-day curry house, operating a menu of mainstay dishes: chicken korma, dhansak (usually mutton or goat meat), rogan josh (lamb curry), and madras curry (known for packing in heat).

Still, chefs do accommodate the “less tropical palates of locals,” notes former restaurant worker Shahena Begum, a second-generation British Bangladeshi from Huddersfield in northern England. That might mean blending sauces to reduce chunkiness, or adding coconut cream to make it vegan friendly. It’s a contrast to food cooked at home, she says.

Sometimes the changes even have taken her aback, she says: the abundance of sugar added “to suit the Western palate” or the accompaniment of chicken tikka masala by fries, for example.

The new wave

A newer, wealthier wave of immigrants from the Indian subcontinent in the 1990s turned up their noses at the creamy curries cooked by their predecessors. Instead, they refocused curry on street food and specializing around regional and cultural cuisines.

Aktar Islam’s Michelin-starred restaurant Opheem cooks food inspired by influences across India. His “experimental approach” garners advanced bookings as one of London’s most recognized places to eat. “There’s a nuanced understanding about Indian-inspired food nowadays and [about] what British curry is,” says Mr. Islam.

Similar high-end, luxury “authentic” restaurants now dominate British cities, attracting a new generation of young Britons accustomed to evolved palates.

Mr. Islam credits this boom on better education of Britain’s postcolonial history and more Britons traveling abroad, thereby granting them an understanding of the “difference between real Indian food and British curry.”

For Ms. Begum, who bridges the gap between the immigrant pioneers embraced in the early years of Queen Elizabeth and a new generation, curry epitomizes change and mass acceptance. 

After years of being made to feel embarrassed for eating curry for dinner at home, she says, “curry, as a national dish, is like a love letter.”