Similar processes occurred in France, where exotic colonial fruits, for example, replaced more traditional ingredients in French desserts, allowing for the inclusion of the exotic other without altering the traditional French forms. Some scholars have articulated this process whereby curry became a naturalized English dish as an act of incorporation, through which the colonial other was rendered less foreign. Memsahibs adapted local dishes to British tastes and needs, eventually codifying meals and homogenizing a varied cuisine under the blanket term “curries” through the dissemination of recipes at home.

Returning East India Company employees initially brought curry to Britain, but it was Anglo-Indian wives who played an important role in the transformation of curry dishes and their popularization at home. Shown here are the frontispiece of the book and the text of the recipe. The first recipe for curry in Britain appeared in the 1747 edition of The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse. Maybe Pascale’s comment, and the implied but unacknowledged history behind it, struck me because I’ve been thinking a lot about the culinary history of decolonization as we prepare the menu for the National History Center’s upcoming International Seminar on Decolonization Reunion Conference. Whether it’s preparing a family meal or competing on a national baking show, issues of assimilation and national identity are all up for contestation and negotiation in the culinary arena. In the same way that writing history is an act of interpretation, so too is the art of cooking an act of historical interpretation. And yet, the process by which curry became one of the most popular dishes in modern Britain is a complicated one of imperial appropriation, invention, and transformation. Her comment, which drew on a legacy of presumed British culinary expertise concerning curry, carried a clear message: Brits know their curry.

Being a Brit, we eat a lot of curry, and I don’t taste it in this.” As I was watching Food Network’s Spring Baking Championship, this comment by Lorraine Pascale, one of the judges on the show, jumped out at me.

Eating the Empire by Troy Bickham