Curry Tales: How impoverished sailors & indentured workers gave birth to uber-spicy diaspora cuisine
Indian restaurant abroad, taken a bite and thought, “Wow, that’s really spicy!” This can just be the sharp contrast, if it’s in a country where the other food we’ve been eating has been bland.
But Indian restaurants abroad can be surprisingly spicy, in ways we don’t expect with our home food. This is true of British curry houses, with their curries ranked by hotness, from mildKormas to medium-hot Madras, hotter Vindaloo and painfully hot Phaal (an invented term).
And it is true of newer Indian restaurants that claim to serve really ‘authentic’ food, which generally seems to mean ‘do you dare’ flavour levels. Or ‘reeking of a bazaar masculinity’ as Krishnendu Ray, professor of food studies at New York University, recently described such restaurant food on social media.
Ray’s term seems right because one reason for this extra heat could be that this food was typically cooked by men.
There are, of course, many Indian restaurants abroad run by women, who can also dish out the heat. But the template for these restaurants was set by the male migrants who started them, and established conventions like the British curry house scale of spice. Liberal spicing has been seen as the defining characteristic of Indian food, but this may be more true in the diaspora.
In India, spices are just one element in a dish, along with souring agents, cooking oils, pulses and vegetables that can be very distinct in different parts of India. Souring agents like tamarind, curd, kokum, amchur, anardana and others are arguably even more distinct to different cuisines in India. They are usually added midway in cooking, binding the base flavours, while spices, when fried in a tadka and added at the last minute, provide the aromatic top notes.
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