In 1810, London newspaper readers came across an advertisement for a new establishment near Portman Square: the Hindoostane Coffee House, on George Street, where gentlemen returned from India could eat "Indian dishes, in the highest perfection" and smoke the hookah with "real chilm tobacco". It was Britain's first dedicated Indian restaurant, and its proprietor, Sake Dean Mahomed, was one of the more extraordinary figures of the age — a Patna-born veteran of the East India Company's army, an emigrant first to Ireland and then England, and already the first Indian author published in English, thanks to his 1794 book of travels. The restaurant was ahead of its market: wealthy nabobs preferred to employ Indian cooks at home, and within a couple of years the venture was in bankruptcy proceedings. Mahomed, undaunted, reinvented himself in Brighton as a "shampooing surgeon", offering therapeutic Indian massage baths, and rose to serve as such to both George IV and William IV. His curry house failed; his instinct was merely a century and a half early.
Curry itself had been seeping into British kitchens long before. Hannah Glasse's famous cookbook of 1747 carried the first known curry recipe published in English — "To make a currey the India way" — a mild affair of chicken, turmeric, ginger and pepper. The Victorians industrialised the taste: commercial curry powders promised the East in a tin, mulligatawny soup and kedgeree colonised the breakfast table, and Queen Victoria, besotted with India and attended in her later years by her Indian servant Abdul Karim, had curry prepared in the royal kitchens. Curry in Britain was never an import kept at arm's length; it was absorbed, adapted and anglicised from the start.
The modern curry house, though, is largely the creation of one community. Seamen from Sylhet, in what is now Bangladesh, worked the engine rooms of British merchant ships as lascars, and some settled in dockside cities and opened cafés. After the Second World War and the upheavals of Partition, Sylheti families bought up bombed-out chip shops and cafés, serving curry and rice alongside English staples, then converting wholesale as demand grew. Brick Lane in East London became the emblem of the trade, and to this day the substantial majority of Britain's "Indian" restaurants are run by families of Bangladeshi origin — one of the great quiz-night gotchas in the national larder. The grander end of the market has its own landmark: Veeraswamy on Regent Street, opened in 1926, is generally counted the oldest Indian restaurant still operating in Britain.
Inventing tradition, twice
Two dishes bookend curry's naturalisation. The first is coronation chicken, devised in 1953 by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume of the Cordon Bleu school in London for the coronation luncheon of Elizabeth II: cold chicken in a lightly curried, creamy sauce, engineered to be prepared in advance for hundreds of foreign guests and to survive British catering. It became a sandwich-filling immortal. The second is chicken tikka masala — grilled marinated chicken in a spiced tomato-cream sauce — whose origin is gloriously contested. The most cherished claim belongs to the Shish Mahal restaurant in Glasgow, where the late chef Ali Ahmed Aslam was said to have improvised the sauce in the 1970s with a tin of tomato soup for a customer who found his tikka too dry. Food historians counter that the dish is a plain descendant of Delhi's butter chicken, and no documentation settles it; a 2009 campaign even sought EU protected status tying the dish to Glasgow, without success. The myth says eureka; the record says evolution — and both say Britain.
The dish's political coronation came in 2001, when Foreign Secretary Robin Cook declared chicken tikka masala "a true British national dish", not despite its hybrid origins but because of them — Britain, he argued, absorbs and adapts external influences, and the masala sauce was added to satisfy the British desire for gravy. Curry houses number in the thousands, "going for an Indian" is a national ritual, and balti — itself probably a Birmingham invention of the 1970s — has its own quarter with tourist signage. A cuisine carried by soldiers, students, lascars and refugees became the default Friday night; the empire's most durable legacy on the British high street is a menu. Dean Mahomed's failed coffee house, it turns out, was not a dead end but a prophecy.
Quiz nuggets
- Sake Dean Mahomed opened Britain's first Indian restaurant, the Hindoostane Coffee House, on London's George Street in 1810.
- Mahomed later became "shampooing surgeon" in Brighton to George IV and William IV, and was the first Indian author published in English.
- Hannah Glasse's 1747 cookbook contains the first curry recipe published in English.
- Coronation chicken was created by Constance Spry and Rosemary Hume for Elizabeth II's 1953 coronation luncheon.
- Glasgow's Shish Mahal claims chicken tikka masala, allegedly improvised with tomato soup; Robin Cook called the dish "a true British national dish" in 2001.