It’s smart of Patak’s, purveyor of slightly superior chutneys and poppadoms, to have bought advertising time in the ad breaks (the far too frequent ad breaks, alas) during Channel 4’s swank new series of the Raj, Indian Summers. I can’t be the only person who watches it and thinks: mmm, curry. But then, my interest in what its characters eat and drink has already turned into a kind of obsession. Does the series have a food adviser? (Lisa Heathcote, who mocks up the fish mousses eaten by the Dowager Countess et al in Downton Abbey, is thought so vital to the series’ unnerving global success, she was recently the subject of a profile in the New York Times.) I’ve no idea. All I can tell you is that I would be more than willing to help out on the second series.
Everything I know about the food eaten by the British in India, admittedly not much, comes courtesy of a brilliant book called The Raj at Table by David Burton (published in 1993, I fear it may be out of print, though you can pick up a first edition on AbeBooks for less than a fiver) – and it was to this slim volume that I turned about half an hour into episode one. The ghastly Cynthia (Julie Walters), who runs the British Club in Simla, had just announced to the partying hordes that roast beef would be served shortly. Can this be right, I thought. Wouldn’t beef have been hard to come by? What about refrigeration? And who would have agreed to prepare it? Not her Indian cooks, surely.
According to Burton, though, beef was indeed eaten during the Raj, albeit not very often, and for practical reasons rather than out of respect for Hindus; Indian cows were not bred for table, and the meat was dark, tough and not to British palates. Roasting was rare, the meat having often been salted, dried (in this form it was called, fabulously, ding dong) or even pickled, but it did happen occasionally. It was served with Yorkshire pudding – cooked in ghee if the beef had not yielded enough fat – and a lot of horseradish, which grew well in some bits of India (where it did not, the root of the moringa or “drumstick tree” served as a substitute). The rest of the time, it was turned into curry. The Raj at Table includes several recipes for such dishes, including one for tongue curry… “boil the tongue till tender enough to be pierced easily with a broomstick”.
The book is quite good on the kind of clubs the dreaded Cynthia runs, the first of which, the Bengal, was established in Calcutta in 1827. So, besides roast beef, what else should the producers have her serving up? According to Burton, thanks to the railways, oysters sometimes got as far as Simla (the best beds were at Madras, Bombay and Karachi). However, in season, the hill town’s greatest treat was its raspberries, a prized yellow variety found in the Himalayas that was regularly exhibited at the Horticultural Society’s shows. He doesn’t mention nimbu pani (Indian lemonade), which Cynthia instructed her major-domo to offer to some soldiers in the second episode, but he does note that the Simla club invented its own rum cocktail, a rival to the gimlets drunk on verandahs elsewhere (a gimlet, in case you’re on the razzle tonight, is – whoah! – three parts dry gin to one part Rose’s lime cordial). The Simla rum cocktail basically comprises hefty measures of whisky mixed with red or white curaçao. Two of these, and you probably wouldn’t care if your roast beef was a little on the chewy side.
This is the sort of stuff I find intensely pleasing, and I’m glad I was able to dig out The Raj at Table from its hiding place behind The River Cottage Meat Book. Even so, one nagging question remained after that first episode of Indian Summers: the problem of Cynthia’s cooks, and whether they would have been willing to prepare beef, which Burton doesn’t quite answer. Of course, they could have been Muslim or Christian. But this didn’t seem like a complete answer to me, so I decided to consult a noted guru in the matter of such things, my colleague Ian Jack, the editor of the recently published Indian-themed edition of Granta. It was he who told me of the Maghs or Muggs, who were often to be found in the kitchens of British clubs and bungalows. They came from Arakan, were Buddhist, and were, apparently, happy to cook pretty much anything. The Muggs don’t often appear in books – or, it seems, in television series. But they did and do exist. “I have had food from a Mugg cook,” Ian wrote in an email. “And very good it was, too.”
rachel.cooke@observer.co.uk
