Nostalgic Cuisine With A Contemporary Comeback

Long before culinary gurus thought of fusion food, it was Anglo-Indian cuisine that was perhaps the precursor or inspiration for this trend. By assimilating and amalgamating ingredients and cooking techniques from all over the Indian sub-continent, it became a completely new cuisine with a distinctive flavour of its own. Fareeda Kanga discovers nostalgic cuisine that has made a contemporary comeback.

- Fareeda Kanga

There is a certain glamour about Anglo-Indian cuisine which makes it so appealing with quirkily named dishes like Railway Lamb or Mutton Curry, The Dak Bungalow Curry, Grandma’s Country Captain Chicken, Colonel Standhurst’s Beef Curry, Veal Country Captain, Devil Pork Curry, Calcutta Cutlets (Kobhiraji Cutlets), Fish Kedgeree and so on. All these dishes were a direct throwback to the conditions prevailing at the time of the Raj!

Anglo-Indian cuisine has evolved over hundred of years as a result of reinventing and reinterpreting western cuisine. By assimilating and amalgamating ingredients and cooking techniques from all over the Indian sub-continent it became a completely new cuisine that was neither too bland nor too spicy, but with a distinctive flavour of its own.

“Obviously over time, Anglo-Indian cooking was more Indianised than British and developed a strong regional bias. Local ingredients and flavours were incorporated in the dishes while the core ingredients remained unchanged no matter where the dish was prepared,” suggests Lakbhir Singh, Sous Chef, Saffron, Shangri La Hotel, Bengaluru.

Anglo-Indians who were influenced by the Portuguese, British, Dutch and French, incorporated the many herbs and spices that grew in their vicinity and developed their own unique cuisine. Coconut based curries were popular in Anglo-Indian dishes in the south while mustard oil and fresh water fish were popular ingredients in the Anglo-Indian dishes of Calcutta and West Bengal.