Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race (Exploded Views) - Softcover

Ruthnum, Naben

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1552453510 ISBN 13: 9781552453513

Verlag: Coach House Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

No two curries are the same. This Curry asks why the dish is supposed to represent everything brown people eat, read, and do.

Curry is a dish that doesn't quite exist, but, as this wildly funny and sharp essay points out, a dish that doesn't properly exist can have infinite, equally authentic variations. By grappling with novels, recipes, travelogues, pop culture, and his own upbringing, Naben Ruthnum depicts how the distinctive taste of curry has often become maladroit shorthand for brown identity. With the sardonic wit of Gita Mehta's Karma Cola and the refined, obsessive palette of Bill Buford's Heat, Ruthnum sinks his teeth into the story of how the beloved flavor calcified into an aesthetic genre that limits the imaginations of writers, readers, and eaters. Following in the footsteps of Salman Rushdie's Imaginary Homelands, Curry cracks open anew the staid narrative of an authentically Indian diasporic experience.

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Naben Ruthnum won the Journey Prize for his short fiction, has been a National Post books columnist, and has written books and cultural criticism for the Globe and Mail, Hazlitt, and the Walrus. His crime fiction has appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and Joyland, and his pseudonym Nathan Ripley's first novel will appear in 2018. Ruthnum lives in Toronto.

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Curry

Eating, Reading, and Race

By Naben Ruthnum

COACH HOUSE BOOKS

Copyright © 2017 Naben Ruthnum
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-55245-351-3

CHAPTER 1

Eating

Like the English language, curry is a colonial endpoint: everything ended up in it, and it remains infinitely changeable, even as its complex colonial roots became disguised as homeland authenticity. The tikka masala-inventing cooks at Indian restaurants in the 1970s gave Indian, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi immigrants a tasteable identity – a primarily British public encountered these people from the saucy, spicy dishes that would seem out of place in the homeland kitchens of these émigré chefs. What the Brits were really eating was the improvisations of various chefs. Tikka masala's (disputed) origin: a Pakistani restaurateur in Glasgow added some tomato sauce to the meal of a bus driver who was complaining that his food was dry. Without abandoning the spices on the rack and the colonially informed cuisine they grew up with, the immigrant cooks of Great Britain shaped a cuisine that is definitive of eating out, and carry-out, in the U.K.

Even the most commonly understood characteristic of curry came to be by way of the machinations of international trade and colonialism. Curry has many immutable qualities, but no definition of the dish can escape heat, or at the very least the potential for heat. This central characteristic is what prompts diners to say, 'It's not too hot, is it?' or 'Make it actually hot, not just medium, I can take it,' to bored waiters in Indian restaurants all over the world. Though it is a truly difficult fact for many Indians and children of Indian immigrants to acknowledge, chilies are not native to India at all they were actually brought to the subcontinent from the Caribbean in the fifteenth century, by way of the trade-savvy, empire-hungry Portuguese.

It's slightly identity-shaking to me – and perhaps to any brown person who wasn't previously aware of the history – to find out that chilies were planted on our shores by some spice-route jagoff. Lizzie Collingham's superb 2005 book Curry (subtitled A Biography in the U.K. and A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors in North America) is committed to drawing out the historical truths that shaped the elusive identity of curry. Indian recipes, including ones in the vast curry family, have been adapted or altered to suit rulers, visitors, and colonial intruders for hundreds of years – with pulao rice arising from Persian pillau rice, and with creams and spices being increased or decreased in various dishes to suit the increasingly adventurous palates of British Raj occupiers. The Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani immigrant cooks in 1970s England who added tinned tomatoes, ginger, garlic, and chili to tandoor-forged chicken to make tikka masala weren't undoing centuries of tradition: they were innovating and adapting a living cuisine that has sustained itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by absorbing them. The inauthenticity of curry is its greatest claim to its position as a reflection of global history and the present politics of hunger, eating, and identity.

As the resource-leeching rule of the British began to wane in India, a parallel distaste for food from India took place in the U.K. Curries, exotic to some Brits and a powerful reminder of youth and childhood to thousands of whites who'd grown up or spent their career years working for the Empire abroad, fell out of fashion for a while. Collingham points to a post-Victorian backlash against curry due to its supposed unsuitability to middle-class British stomachs and the powerful smells attendant on its preparation. But curry had threaded as deeply into England as the English language had reached into the colonies. The influx of Indian, Bangladeshi, and Pakistani immigrants of the mid-twentieth century made the ingrained British taste for a food that had been part of their own national history impossible to ignore, and curry made its comeback. 'By 1970 there were two thousand Indian restaurants in Britain,' Collingham writes. This number has since climbed to about 12,000, with estimated sales of £4.2 billion.

The food served in these establishments as late-twentieth-century U.K. Indian cuisine took shape often had little to do with what the cooks ate at home. For their children, this wasn't the case. In an interview Collingham quotes, landmark British restaurateur Haji Shirajul Islam discusses how he didn't eat the curries his restaurants prepared, but that his son's palate quickly took a British turn: 'When he goes to the restaurant he eats Madras – hot one ... Me I always eat in the house. When I offer him food he eats it, but he says it's not tasty like restaurant food, because he's the other way round now.' As Lizzie Collingham concludes: 'For generations of British customers, and even second-generation Indians, the vindaloos and dhansaks, tarka dhals and Bombay potatoes, are Indian food.'

As a first-generation Mauritian-Canadian, eating salmon and chicken curry and smelling it as it cooked were the earliest markers of my difference growing up, though I had to go outside and make white friends to truly find that out. In Kelowna, where I spent my childhood and teen years, I was twice literally asked what colour my blood was in a friendly, genuinely curious tone. Even as a child, I noticed the noticing, the whipped-around heads at the melanin flood my family represented when we entered any public space in 1980s Kelowna. Food supplies were also a problem: key ingredients for curry and other Mauritian meals had to be picked up on weekend missions to Vancouver, the nearest city with a significant population of South Asian transplants. For a few years, garam masala was shipped directly to us from Mauritian family in packages that leaked a powerful odour no matter how well they'd been wrapped. Curry travels along with the diaspora, continuing the long trip of its evolving existence. The range of variations on curry dishes just across the subcontinent, leaving out islands like Mauritius and Guyana, or significant outposts of diasporic Indians such as South Africa, is staggering. I can still go to an Indian restaurant and taste something made with ingredients that are entirely Indian but quite foreign to me. I had chicken chettinad and tasted the cinnamony tree-lichen kalpasi just a few months ago. It makes perfect sense that I'm unfamiliar with many Indian dishes: I learned them all from restaurants and books over here. From an early age, my parents made me aware that there were minor and major differences between Mauritian and Indian food, even if they didn't provide a detailed explanation. Something to do with ginger and the Chinese population on the island, the story would start, before deviating into an anecdote about Chan, the man who ran the corner grocery on the street where my father grew up. Curry stories have a propensity for tipping into the nostalgic.

Curry is not a cliché. Well, maybe it is. The unifying notion of curry as an authentic, homeland-defining collection of dishes that form a cultural touchstone for diasporic brown folks is a cliché, in the same way food-based bonds between people from any culture who find themselves in a new land is a cliché. But curry can't be trapped. If you push through the cliché, you arrive at a surprising truth: the history of this ever-inauthentic mass of dishes is a close parallel to the formation of South Asian diasporic identity, which is as much of a blend of conflicting cultural messages forced into coherence as...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Coach House Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1552453510
• ISBN 13: 9781552453513
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 144
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar