The other day I was in a Fabindia store near their food counter, trying to resist the temptation to buy their excellent strawberry jam, when a couple of tourists who were browsing their organic grains and spices, turned to me and asked with heavy French accent: “Why iz zere no curry powder?” I told them to try Crawford Market, where they might find stuff made for the export market, since Indians almost never use it.
Neither do the British these days, having had it dinned into them that curry powder was a perversion of the Raj for which they are still atoning (those searing-hot vindaloos they eat are certainly good punishment). But with no colonial curry guilt, the French seem happy to keep using it.
Classic French haute cuisine, with its refinement and restraint may seem far removed from the insistent warmth of curry powder, yet as Elizabeth David notes in French Provincial Cooking, one of her best books, it often crops up unexpectedly in French recipes. Never very much, just a teaspoonful and usually devoid of chillies, so it plays only a background note of mild warmth and colour, yet le curry is called for.
The French even attempted what the Brits never did, and Indians would think incomprehensible: they tried to regulate by law the proportions of curry powder. According to Larousse Gastronomique, the ultimate authority on French cooking, “In 1884, at the Universal Paris Exhibition the composition of curry powder was set by decree: 34 gms tamarind; 44 gms onions; 20 gms coriander; 5 gms chilli pepper; 3 gms turmeric; 2 gms cumin; 3 gms fenugreek; 2 gms pepper; 2 gms mustard.” There is something so typically French in this passion for precise measurement and order!
David suggests curry powder is typically used in dishes derived from the French colonies. I was rather dubious of their existence after reading about a London restaurant called La Porte des Indes, which claimed to offer Franco-Indian food from Pondicherry. I am reasonably familiar with Pondicherry and I’ve never found anything particularly Franco-Indian about food there.
Decent approximations of French food, certainly (especially the baguettes, mysteriously better than most bread in India), and good Indian, but little evidence of fusion. Perhaps there are private recipes, but the claims made by La Porte des Indes, in articles and in a cookbook they produced, rather reeked of Regular Restaurant Hype.
Then I found David Burton’s Colonial French Cooking, and I realised that French fusion exists. The New Zealand-based Burton is an excellent food writer with a particular interest in how historical interactions between imposed Western cuisines and existing native ones created new cuisines.
His The Raj at Table is the best study of Indian food during the Raj, while a major theme in his Savouring the East is the extended influence of Portuguese food across Asia. French Colonial Cooking takes up Gallo-global gastronomy, and it is a fascinating story, not least because it shows French food itself to be far more flexible and assimilative than the French want to admit.
Contrary to the image of a fixed-in-aspic classical cuisine, the French have readily taken on new ingredients and recipes, but always with a firm French twist. So out go the strongest Indian spices, but mild ones like turmeric and coriander are retained, and given new partnerships with classic French flavours like thyme, bay leaves and parsley.
Like in the Indian Ocean island of Réunion, for example, where chilli is dropped, but instead, “turmeric, onions, garlic, salt, pepper, thyme, and sometimes the leaf of the allspice bush go into the curries of meat and poultry, while fish and crustacean curries incorporate plenty of tomato and a little grated fresh ginger.”
Such French-style fusion is the same as our often disparaged tendency to Indianise dishes; far from being a corruption, Burton suggests, these are signs of a confident cuisine that isn’t afraid to evolve, but on its own terms.
It’s interesting to note though that the maximum fusion doesn’t seem to happen on mainlands, like Pondicherry. Burton says that a small number of “unique hybrid dishes” survives there, but the recipes he gives, for lamb or green beans, seem fairly standard Tamilian to me. As with biological evolution, the real culinary leaps seem to happen when communities are cut off from their roots and crammed together on islands like Mauritius or Reunion.
That’s where you’ll find dishes like achards, or pickles (from achar), rougails, or spicy accompaniments (apparently derived from a Tamil term ouroukaille) and rasson, or rasams, which Burton notes in Mauritius were sometimes spiked with rum! That’s a thought to make a Madrasi mami faint, but it could be a good idea for winter nights.
Apart from colonial linkages though, there’s a far more practical reason for the French use of curry: to use up leftovers. The French passion for fine food has always gone hand in hand with a passion for fine value, and French housewives are known for their frugality and marketing ability, as much as their kitchen skills.
A lot of regular French food is about the skilful use of leftovers – all those sauces can cover up many things – and commercially minded chefs can make this an obsession. Curry powder, they discovered with delight, confused French tastebuds enough to allow them to pass off all kinds of leftovers, especially when presented with enough style.
The most vivid description of this is from Nicholas Freeling, the great crime novelist who passed away this year. In his youth Freeling worked in restaurant kitchens and wrote The Kitchen, a magnificently mad book about his time there, which Anthony Bourdain has credited as inspiration for his own berserk and best-selling Kitchen Confidential.
Freeling was working in a grand hotel in a fading French seaside resort where he met a particularly cost-cutting chef: “Curry was a great favourite of Monsieur Bonvalet, who had elevated leftovers into a great art… on the day it was announced we would peel many “button” onions, separate cauliflowers into nice bunches of bloom, and steal large potatoes from the roast-cook, to shape into little balls with a cutter, the size of a marble. We then made a great deal of curry sauce with more onions, apples, a little coconut, thickening it slightly with flour.”
This concoction was then presented with style on three big silver dishes, with the meat, with vegetables cooked in the same way, but kept slightly crisper, and with rice made to seem grander with raisins and almonds. One can be sure that any link with anything really Indian tasting was remote, although Freeling’s technique of sloshing in most of a bottle of gin into the curry must have helped deaden sensations (his hotel guests loved it).
But the apotheosis for this French curry was reached at the end of one year when the chef decided to go all out and make it a Curry Christmas. Putting curry on the menu, he reasoned, would use up the inevitable leftover meat from the usual roast turkeys and geese, and would be relatively easy for the holiday minded cooks to dish up.
Came the day, and they were all prepared: “We had curry for a hundred, plenty of onions and were pleasantly relaxed.” But then a Christmas miracle happened – everyone started ordering the curry: “we sold two hundred and thirty helpings of curry… I bellowed at him [the chef] that there was no more.” “You going to cut it off?” “No no – I make more – I help.” Might have known – when would come another day so golden for making a profit from scraps?”
The larder was scored for every scrap, bones, anything even remotely edible, as the chef screamed: “Give more colly, va!” and made even more rice to fill up the diners. “Curry was served on flat dishes, in soup bowls, in cloche covers; it was war, it was splendid. At three in the afternoon there was rice all over the floor.” The chef was so overjoyed that despite his miserliness, he even bought all his staff a beer.
It was a Curry Christmas to remember, and while we hope, from a strict taste point of view, never to encounter one like it, we can still toast the transformative powers of curry on palates as fixed as those of the French. This Christmas that’s a toast worth raising to – perhaps with rasam spiked with rum!