If ever an innocent piece of fish carried the immense weight of history, it was in that little bowl of Fish Madras curry served at the Hyatt Regency’s The Taste of Britain Curry festival. The story of Britain flirting with curry begins almost four centuries ago, with the Company’s early exports from India. Besides silk, cotton and spices, the classic Indian recipe for curry too made its way, across oceans, to Britain. There, it turned gentle and mild to suit the British palate unused to spice, slowly flourished into a cuisine all its own in the U.K.’s many ‘curry houses’, and is today a five-billion-dollar industry with over 10,000 restaurants dedicated to it. At the Regency’s Curry Festival, the story comes full circle in that plate of British-style Fish Madras, made once again in the land where it originated from.
Organised by U.K.-based Curry Life magazine, alongside a host of chefs with decades of experience making curry in the U.K., the festival recreates for India the British take on the dish’s many variants. “The ingredients are almost always the same,” says Chef Parthamittra, consultant chef with the magazine. “What differs are the quantities, and the combinations. In Britain, the spices will never overpower; the curries are usually light and healthy, with hardly any oil, and you’ll rarely see us use the rich regulars here like cashew and almond paste.” Parthamittra credits the growth of curry in the U.K. to Bangladeshi, Pakistani and Indian immigrant chefs who first popularised the Madras, kurma and jalfrezi styles of curry. But it’s the chicken tikka masala, CTM in colloquial Brit-speak, which has been the curry’s biggest brand ambassador. In 2001, British foreign secretary Robin Cook famously declared it to be “Britain’s true national dish”.
The first British curry house, though, the ‘Hindoostane Coffee House’ in London was founded in the early 19th Century by Sake Dean Mohamed, a soldier from Patna in the East India Company, who travelled to Britain with his Captain Godfrey Evan Baker and eventually settled there. When it shut down from bankruptcy a few years later, Mohamed could hardly have imagined the curry’s popularity today. From the basic kurmas and jalfrezis, the average Brit now knows the spice gradients of fiery vindaloos, hot dal makhanis and moderate kadais, says Parthamittra. While a standard curry meal at a restaurant in Britain could cost you about 50 pounds, Partha adds that it’s the 10-pound microwave-meal curry packets that are all the rage in British convenience stores these days. “You can imagine though, at 10 pounds, the quality of ingredients they’re using,” he says, eyebrow raised.
The age of the traditional Indian curry in the U.K. is almost passé, though. While the industry is still dominated by Indian-origin chefs, with celebrity chefs such as Atul Kochhar and Vineet Bhatia pushing the possibilities of curry, the latest trend sees British chefs try their hand at the cuisine too, spawning quite a few fusion experiments. “We’ve seen Indian fish cooked with British herbs, and also the use of quite a few fruity sauces in curries, with apples, peaches or pears. Some of it is successful because London comprises people from all over the world who want to try new things, but for the most part, diners just prefer the authentic stuff,” says Parthamittra.
For Mark Poynton, Chef-patron at the Michelin-starred Alimentum restaurant in the U.K., his first taste of curry threw him off the cuisine for weeks together. “It was way too powerful for me; I couldn’t even taste the meat,” he says. Years later, Mark watched celebrity television chef Cyrus Todiwala cook curry, and the balance of flavours and spices he achieved changed his mind. He ventured back into the field and began with understanding the properties of each spice individually, beginning with dishes that incorporate just one of them at a time. “That’s the challenge for British chefs cooking curry today; right now, they vary curry from either too spicy or too mild, since they can’t create the range in between because they don’t know how each spice works.”
Mark, today, is at the Regency, with Curry Life ’s chefs, to present his creations at the festival, such as the roasted carrot soup with goat cheese, flavoured primarily with cumin. “What I hope to do here is learn about the correct combinations of spices from local Indian chefs that specialise in exactly this. I want to work up to that perfect biryani someday, where I can taste the spices individually from the blend, the cumin at the beginning, the fenugreek in the middle and that dash of chilli at the end.”
The Taste of Britain Curry festival is on till March 14.
