The Curious Case of Colonial India's Breakfast Curries
“By an Indian breakfast by no means must be understood that simple bread, tea, and butter, which compose an English one.” Edward Fane, the nephew of the British General Sir Henry Fane, devotes a lot of time to describing breakfasts in his memoir of their travels through India, then a British colony, in 1858. Describing the morning meals of local English families, he notes that they include meat and fish and eggs, as well as “the eternal curry and rice.”
This is what the British Raj commonly ate for breakfast: breakfast curry.
You might, like many people, think of curry as a bastardization of Indian food, even a hurtful slur. India’s regional cuisines are hugely varied, multiple, nuanced, delicious; rejecting curry is a way of rejecting their oversimplification or appropriation. Curry is colonial, it gestures at India with only the waviest of hands, it’s been co-opted since British people came to India in 1608 and misheard “kari.” These sentiments have been echoed over the past decades, both by academics and even the great actress and cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey, who wrote, “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s.”
Given the rich history of chop suey, this may be a more apt comparison than Jaffrey intends. Although curry is often described as an invention of British colonizers, Indians ate what non-Indians call curries long before the British arrived, and Indians across India still eat all kinds of curry today. Curry is not a colonial relic.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/curry-in-colonial-india
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1997. We were in the four corners there, and I remember how varied the food was there, among other things of course. Breakfast was definitely memorable there!
Me: never again with the “regular” b’fast when in any such place!
