Old spice and new

CURRY: A BIOGRAPHY

BY LIZZIE COLLINGHAM

Chatto & Windus, 366pp, 16.99

IN GLASGOW, GOING OUT FOR A curry is a serious social occasion. But I have to confess that when I lived there I never shared my friends' enjoyment of Ashoka, Caf India, or Karma Sutra. Like the Victorian curry powder manufacturer Edmund White, cited in this delectable little book, I found the food "nothing more nor less than a bad stew, rendered the more abominably noxious from the quantity of yellowish green fat which must inevitably float in the dish".

Having as a teenager eaten the most wonderful dishes prepared by an Indian friend's mother, I was always immensely disappointed. Now, thanks to Lizzie Collingham, I know why: with the odd exception, Indian restaurant food in Britain bears as much resemblance to cookery from the subcontinent as a McDonald's meal does to Petrus.

This is more a biography of Indian food - as interpreted around the world from India itself to Fiji - and the many and varied ingredients that have made it what it is today, than of curry, which is actually a British term for a very limited range of dishes comprising sauce and meat or fish.

Not that it does to be a purist in these matters. There never was a golden age of authentic Indian cookery.

Derived from Ayurvedic medicine, the underlying principles of Indian cookery state that the body must be kept in "a state of equilibrium with its environment", which means heavy, fatty meat dishes with wine and honey during the cold months and cold foods such as milky gruels during hot weather: "The idea of mixing hot and cold foods to achieve a sublime blend of the six essential tastes (pungent, acidic, salty, sweet, astringent and bitter) still lies at the heart of Indian cookery today."

From there, the story is one of immigration. From central Asia, the Mughals brought fruit, meat and a recipe for roast black rat: "these are fried in hot oil holding with the tail till the hair is removed; after washing with hot water, the stomach is cut and the inner parts are cooked with amla [sour mango] and salt". The Portuguese brought the chilli from the Caribbean to Goa (until 1500 the Bengali Piper longum or long pepper was the hottest spice in India) and Christianity to a land of Hindus and Muslims (by 1650 two-thirds of Goans had converted to Catholicism out of self-interest; keen to oblige their new masters, former Hindus began eating beef and former Muslims began to eat pork).

The British brought classification and melded a very regionalised cookery into a hybrid that suited only themselves. But they also took it home. The Victorians, as Thackeray reflected in Vanity Fair, were highly fond of curry. The amusement the Sedleys gain from Becky Sharp's tortures with cayenne pepper and chilli serves almost to define the western response to spicy food.

The Hindostanee Coffee House, opened by Sake Dean Mohamed in 1811 at the corner of Charles and George Street in London, was the first Indian restaurant in Britain. Now there are 8,000 restaurants, most of them run by Bangladeshis. After a long period, stretching from the late 19th century to the 1970s, when Indian food was unfashionable, it became a regular part of the British diet again with the large-scale immigration of families from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

Now it is embedded in British culture. When the late Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary, he declared in a 2001 speech that chicken tikka masala was the very essence of British multiculturalism.

Indeed, British-Indian food is now an export - to India. Flavours of India, the BBC series filmed by Madhur Jaffrey - who turned to cookery writing after moving from India to London and then New York in the 1980s - was recently shown on an Indian cable TV station.

Packed with fascinating facts, analysis and even some recipes, this book is a mouth-watering introduction not only to Indian food, but to the history of the subcontinent and its hugely influential place in the world.

It may even have inspired me to go back to one of those Glasgow restaurants to give it another try - this time, much better informed and hopefully with much more discerning tastebuds. Just don't ask me to drink the godawful lager again.