Empire: World History - 126. Punch & Chilli: The East India Company at the Table

Episode Date: February 27, 2024

When the East India Company first arrived on the shores of India, the food they ate in their first factories was not so different from that of Britain. It was all stews, heavy with butter and stuffed with spices, almonds, cinnamon, fruit and raisins, scooped up by bread. Although the Portuguese introduced the chilli to Goa at the start of the 16th century, it had not yet travelled into North India. Over the course of the next 200 years the cuisines of the British and the Indians diverged, in no small part due to the chilli. Listen as William and Anita explore the wonderful history of the East Indian Company at Table. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Hello and welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. Eventually, William Doranpool. I mean, listen, can I just say normally? Normally, I get a little bit irritable when you're late, but today you have by far the most extraordinary reason

I've ever heard for your latest. Would you like to tell the class why you have arrived late to this podcast today? Well, the truth is that my pigeons escaped. No, that's not what you... No, no, no. That is... See, that's plausible,

but what you actually messaged me on the WhatsApp, I'll be another two minutes, another three minutes, another four minutes, because I'm putting my pigeons to bed. It's what you said, you lunatic. It's true. For those who don't know my after-hours activities. I just have images of you going around to each and every one of them kissing them all on the beak.

Good night. Good night. That's more than that's more than that. That's more than that. I have some very nice Muglai-Sherazi pigeons who are fan tales with gorgeous markings. and there's now about 23 of them, 24 of them. But anyway, they escaped. So they had to be put to bed.

Can I just once again cast a bright light on the differences between our existence? Because I'd drop the kids at school, then I had to circle back to take some rugby kit that was forgotten at home, and then got stuck in a traffic jam and then still made it on time. But, you know, differences. Differences in our textured existences. Anyway, I highly recommend keeping pigeons. Can I also say that, you know, you are a modern man, a modern Britain, Indian Indian Indian Indian Indian Indian Indian. Because had you been a man, and we're going to cover this because we're covering food.

We are covering Indian food and the British relationship with Indian food in this podcast. Had you been born in a different era, those pigeons wouldn't have had a chance. That's also true. Seriously. Those pigeons would have been well tunduried by now. In a curry. Cabbed, skewered. We've had just the most glorious time researching this little palate cleanser of a mini.

series. We all thought that it was getting a bit much when we had Houthis and Hezbollah and the Islamic Revolution back to back. So we thought we could be something a bit, a little bit lighter and a little bit more pleasurable. Yeah. So we're talking about Indian food and how it has changed from the start of the East India Company, arriving in India, right up until 1947 partition. And today, today, where even now there are massive fights that go on here in Britain about who invented the Balti. Who owns the Balti? And who invented chicken tika masala? Was it in the Motie Mahal deluxe in Delhi or was it in Glasgow?

This is a crucial matter. There's actually reached Parliament. There's been parliamentary debates on this. There's no mucking around with the subject matter on this programme. I mean, you said it's sort of less contentious than, you know, the kind of events we've been discussed. I would argue. People feel very strongly about this. Are we allowed to introduce this series, Anita, by getting you to tell your story about making kejury at school in Essex?

Okay, okay. William is endlessly amused by the fact that I am an Essex girl and a proud Essex girl. A proud Essex girl. A proud Essex girl. Something about being both Essex and Punjabi that kind of just gets every genetic sort of. Combustible combination. A five-star combustible rating imaginable. Wow.

So in my school, which was quite an old-fashioned score, they had a rather, I mean, an absolutely lovely teacher, Miss Wallace, who did home economics, which was trying to civilise the absolute monsters in a year and tried to teach us how to survive on things that weren't in tins or beans and toast and stuff. So we'd have cookery lessons. And I mean, it was all fine and it was flans and pancakes and, you know, a pie or stuff like that. And then she said, right, next week, we're going to do an Indian-inspired dish. And I was like, oh, very excited. Me, me, it's all about me.

And she gave us this recipe and we had to bring in all the ingredients for kedgery. And she said it's inspired by an Indian dish. And I don't know it sounds a bit like kittily, which we eat at home, which is a rice and lentil dish. If you're ill, it is your go-to medicine in any Indian household. They will give you kishley for anything. I mean, literally anything. So I went home with this shopping list for my mother. And first of all, she took enormous umbrage at the fact that there was curry powder on the English.

What the hell is it is? Which we will come back to as well. We'll circle back to that. I mean, there were all sorts of things. She was just appalled by, like, eggs and fish and rice. What the hell is this? And probably in those days, Uncle Ben's rice rather than Basmati. Well, it wasn't Basmati.

I tell you that much. So, yeah, I can't remember what it was. It could well have been Uncle Benz. That's what I remember in the kitchen. One of the very rare occasions we had rice. We had tiny little packets of Uncle Ben's. And this is the same period of Scottish history, we should say, that if you wanted to get olive oil,

you had to go to the Turopity Department of Boots. People used to rub it on their feet. That was the only use of olive oil. So you used foot oil in your cooking. So the neighbours would have believed. Yum. Well, actually, I'm having a flashback now. No, you know, we didn't use Uncle Benz.

My mum specially went out to go and get a little bag of rice because that was what was stipulated on Miss Wallace's shopping list. But actually, Indians, even in Essex, would go shopping for ingredients on a mass, like an extinction level event scale. So there'd be an Indian mark, Cash and Carrie. And she would buy like this sack of rice. A sack of rice that was much bigger than me or a sack of flour, the chapperties. Anyway, so I took all of this in, hope in my heart, thinking, my moment to shine. This is my culture, sort of.

I don't know. My mom says it's not that Miss Wallace says it is. I did everything I did everything right because you know me I'm a good girl You are It was disgusting

It was so awful Normally You know Everybody would fall on this dish That we'd made in home economics And just devour it Nobody Nobody wanted to borrow us

Least of all Poor Indian Essex girl Trying very hard to be proud of my culture Ish I got through four An Anglo Indian What could be often quite disgusting, cold-boiled eggs sliced in it. Yes, that was in there.

And there was onions. And there was fish. There was flaked fish, which, I mean, honestly, we were such embersy. I'm sure we didn't cook it properly. So raw fish. It was a gastromic abomination is what we produce. But there is, I think, a serious point in this story and in this episode, because food is a fabulous example of the Brits,

completely misunderstanding everything about it. just a bit. Not only getting the names wrong, not only mangling everything up, but completely misunderstanding everything. The difference between Kittry and Kedri is as difference as coal and diamonds, my one, I'd say. They're both carbon base. So we should say also that there are two fabulous books that we've both been reading this. Oh yes, aren't they gorgeous. And we should, we should fess up that they are the sources of everything good and funny that we found this. One is a wonderful book by a New Zealand cookery writer. I think it's almost the best social history of the British and India I've ever read called The Raj at Table.

It's about so much more than the food, isn't it? And it's terribly funny. Every second page makes you laugh. 1993, it came out a while ago, but it's very, very good, still in print, Faber book. And then the other one is by a friend of mine, Lizzie Collingham, Elizabeth Collingham, who is a grown-up academic with a proper academic job, but wrote a fabulous book called Curry that reads like a dream and is the story of that dish, which of course is the dish that your mum said does not exist in India,

which is the great and important story behind the story, one of the many things that the British should have invented about India that weren't true. And it has been an absolute pleasure to deep dive into some of the old texts that, you know, certainly we have used a source material for our books, because it forced me to go back to Emily Eden, who was subjected to many a banquet as she was sometimes reluctantly travelling around India.

I hadn't realised quite how much I'd written about food in all my books. In white muggles and last muggle, it's absolutely packed with people talking about what that's reading. But it's interesting. It's interesting because, you know, it charts not just the way in which social cohesion works between the Brits and the Indians

in a new country that, first of all, they've discovered. And then they end up sort of mastering. But it also tells you a little bit about the differences in culture between the two. Their attitudes towards eating. And this is an equally important point, the similarities. And that, in a sense, is quite a good place to start. And I remember when I first read David Burton's book, this was the thing which struck me. Because the point he makes right at the beginning, and it's a lovely point,

is that because British cooking and Indian cooking could not be more different today, we assume it was always so. But he makes the wonderful point that when the Tudors first turn up at Surat and found a factory in what's now Gujarat, the cooking of both peoples was very, very similar. Yes. And that the standard dish in England

was a sort of a fruit stew. Can you remember in one of our earlier episodes, we talked about how Henry Hyde made money from importing currents during the early period Elizabethan period. And I cracked the hilarious joke, which I'll restate, which is currency.

I didn't laugh enough then, oh, now. I missed it at the time. I can't understand. Currency. He did, it's true. He made a fortune from currents. And David Burton opens

with a chicken pie recipe from England in 1615, and in it is chicken, currants, raisins, cinnamon, mace, salt and spice. And that's because, of course, in Tudor England, as in India, in the age before refrigeration, meat was often a little bit high, and you needed lots of spice in your food in order to hide that. But at the same time in India, people were eating things like what they

would call a Dumpuk fowl, or what suddenly the English factors in Surat called a Dumpuk fowl, which is a fowl, a chicken, stewed and butter and stuffed with spices, are. almonds and raisins. Moreover, in Elizabeth in England, forks were only just coming into fashion. So most people ate scooping it up with bread, just like was done in India. And then the final thing is, of course, that in India, the Chile had not yet reached North India when the English got that. So the English got to North India before the Chile did. The Chile originated in the Caribbean. The first European to ever come across the chili pepper was Columbus. in the Caribbean.

I mean, one of the most marvellous things in reading, I think it was in the David Burton book, is that, you know, you have spice vendors begging the Brits to understand that, you know, spices didn't need to be as hot. You know, you don't, you didn't, they were being forced to grind curry powder in later life.

They're like, you really don't need this many chilies in this powder. But the other thing is that after a meal in India, you had pun and after meal in Tudon, England, you had something called Voidi, which was not dissimilar to Pan. So when these guys first turned up, these East India Company spice merchants, living in what they called a factory, which was a trading post, on the Indian coast, they were actually surprised by how similar the two cultures were. And the story of Anglo-Indian cooking is the story of 200 years of divergence from what was initially a very, very similar way of eating. Can I just circle back to this, this, what became known in

Elizabeth in England is dumb-poked foul. I love that, dumb-poked. Which is dumb-poked. And we should explain for those who don't eat as much sweet. Well, no, the dum-puck is a specific way of, it is slow cooking, but you have a big, because I love cooking. You have a pot. And you cook very well. That's very kind of you.

A massive pot and you slow cook it within its own steam a little bit. So you put a sort of a layer of pastry, or it would be, you know, sort of chappati flour over the top and seal it and that's a Dumpach. And that's originally an Avadi, a Lak-Navi way of cooking, I believe. Apparently so. I mean, you know, you know Punjabis, we just claim everything. This is how we've always done it. But no, I think you're right.

I mean, they also have heard it's a Mughal innovation. But whatever it was, on Elizabethan tables, that would have been the first thing, the first interaction, I suppose, with anything Indian was this idea of this dumpoked, foul kind of mirror image. Very interesting, though, that these things sound more like puddings to me than they do like savoury dishes. I mean, I don't know about you, but they sound awful. Well, the recipe here, which I love, which is for a little bit later, but it's the same sort of thing. This is an early British cookbook in India, and it recommends what it

calls Bird One stew. Bird one is on the outskirts of Calcutta. And it says, take a roasted or boiled fowl, cut it into pieces, and put them into a stew, put in two ladles full of soup with two dozen anchovies, a glass of white wine, some melted butter, some boiled or roasted onions, pickled oysters. Wow. Cyan pepper, the first appearance of pepper in British cookbooks, stir and let it warm through and add a little lemon juice. Where this is prepared on purpose, the fowl or chicken is only half-roasted or boiled. If boiled, the water or broth is used instead to make soup. Fish may be used, an essence of anchovy instead of the fish.

What strikes me is when this is prepared on purpose, because one would think this is entirely accidentally chuffed in the pan. Some sort of the differentiation. But what I love is that you have a map of world discovery in that very dish. And you see that in other dishes from the 1600s as well, because you start to have, you know, rice, palau kind of dishes coming to England. You start having chutneys. Chutney being another, along with punch. to early Indian words in English. Chutni, chat.

To lick, yeah, something that makes your mouth water. And you drink it down with punch, which is so named, because it had five ingredients. Which comes from the Hindi of Barch or Punjabi of Barch, Banch, five ingredients, Punjab, Banz, that comes from the same stem. But also, you know, mango achar and what they called, I love this, because I wonder if they knew. They called something sawny sauce, Sony sauce. It's a sort of Walkman boiled down. But Soony actually means if they would have traveled through or they would have picked up these words. And I can only see this now through being bilingual.

Soony means beautiful. In what language? In Punjabi? Sorni means. So you start looking at the etymology. A beautiful source. Some shister, slopping something over there, their food as they dock, saying, yeah, this is beautiful sauce.

Sonny sauce. And they think that's the name of it. And that comes back to England as Sony source. I think. You'd have thought in Urdu, it's called Surat. Soni. Sonny, goody. Beautiful, beautiful girl.

Sonny, goody. You may not have heard that many times. I'm telling you. That's what it means. But we should talk about the differences with attitudes to meet because the Brits had a meaty palette, didn't they? Which was not in India necessarily, or not in all parts of India. Absolutely right. And in the very early days,

the Indians complain about how much meat the Brits are eating. So you have one of some of the early observers of the Brits in their early factories in Surat, and they say that the Brits eat four times as much meat in a week as the Indians do in a year. Oh, yes, I saw that. Yes, and how much more weight they put on as a result of this than any Indian native. And this is, yeah, something which continues right through to the end, that the Brits are reaching far, far more than the Indians that are much more overweight. From dear old Emily, Eden, who writes these letters to her sister, traveling, and this is in Victorian English, so this is, you know, later than the 1600s, of course.

But I think this is from 1838 and up the country letters. She says, you know, we had a very small dinner party, but a full room, and then she talks about the people she talks to. She says, we had a most excellent dinner for which all the treasures of the kitchen had been ransacked, and I think all the fowls of the air and the beasts of the earth had been slaughtered. She's so good. I mean, meat figures very, very large when the Brits came to India. And it was something that the Indians had to get on board with.

And when, you know, it becomes from, you know, the East India Company to the Raj, and they find themselves serving in a lot of these kitchens. There are sort of all sorts of ways they have to deal with it. Because, you know, there are a lot of braminical cultures which won't touch meat. So if you were of high standing, you would find that the very rich people would, even build two kitchens. One would be called the Ingris or Bilaiti kitchen, which would prepare the meat dishes and would probably employ somebody from a lower caste or Mohammedan who would be able to, as they would call them then, a Muslim who would be able to handle the kind of meats

at the Brits light. And then a braminical kitchen, pure vegetarian and adhering to the rules of Ayurveda and the old sacraments of Hinduism. And what's interesting is that in this early period. As we say, the early period, you have as much in common as you have divergence. And in this early period, when many Englishmen are living with Indian wives and girlfriends, before the kind of racism has driven them apart in the 17th and in the 18th centuries, you find that many Brits do become vegetarian too. And the famous John Zephaniah Holwell, who wrote the much-criticized account of the Black Colo Calcutta, which he seems to exaggerate the numbers very much. He was a vegetarian. And there's another wonderful character that I write about

in my white moguls called Hindu Stuart. And Charles, Hindu Stuart was an Ulsterman who had a whole variety of Indian wives and his own Brahmins and a buggy which follows him around with a cavalcade of children's carriages and a pulky load of little babes. And he is not only vegetarian. He employs a group of Brahmins whose ritual purity he regarded as essential for properly dressing his Hindu families' food. So you find there's a lot of crossover at this period. And a lot of them in Surat, a lot of these early British traders are dressed in Indian outfits. They're wearing pajamas. And if you look at their wills, they have lists of all their goods. And they've got things like Pictans, which are places where they keep their betel-nut and spittoons. So there's a

whole lot of material culture, which indicates that they're following Indian ways of living. Can I just, again, come back to the meat issue, because I can't get over how much meat was consumed by, you know, the Brits and India. Because, also, it's a hot country. So it's like, it's harder to digest these things in a hot climate. You know, you just don't feel up to it. But, you know, they gave it the good old British heave ho to try and get it down there. But this wonderful detail from Lizzie Collingham, your friend, who says, the British in India consumed stupendous amounts of meat. A surgeon who visited Surat, the place that you're talking about in the 16th, the period that you're talking about. William, calculated that in one month more animals were killed to supply the British table than were generally slaughtered for the entire year to feed the Muslims. And 17th century India

abounded with game and British visitors were completely delighted by the diverse kind of meats. She writes, which was so plentiful because many of the natives eat no kind of flesh at all. And therefore they were cheap, as if they were not worth valuing. So, you know, they were sort of hitting jackpot here. If you had a taste for it, you You could get it cheaply. You could get it everywhere. You could blast out the sky yourself if you felt like it. And, you know, well, hey, Christmas every day.

And then you kind of move to the early presidency town. So Bombay, Madras and Calcutta are all founded. Surat is abandoned. And you have a lot of Brits suddenly hanging out together in this new environment. And it sounds absolutely awful. This is William. Hickey, who's a wonderful Dyerish the 18th century, describing dinner in Calcutta. And he says, in this party, I first saw the barbarous custom of pelleting each other with little balls of bread made like pills across the table, which is practiced by even the fair sex.

Some people could discharge them as such force as to cause considerable pain when struck in the face. Mr. Daniel Barwell was such a proficient that he could, at a distance of three or four yards, snuff out a candle, and that time several times excessively. This strange trick, fitter for savages than Polish society, produced many quarrels, and at last entirely ceased from the following occurrence. He tells the story of this guy who is challenged to a duel over some pelleting. And this produced a duel which the unfortunate pelletor was shot through the body, lay upon his bed many months and never perfectly recovered. And this put a complete stop to the absurd practice.

Wait a minute. Is pelleting meant to be an Indian thing? No. No. I've literally never heard of this. Badly behaved Brits in 18th century. Oh, Brits, okay, Brits abroad. Got you.

Got you, got you, got you. Not Indians. Well, I just suddenly thought. It's a food fight is all this is. The other thing is that, you know, the Brits brought with them their own culinary habits of the times that they ate. So, you know, usually Tiffin would be had by Indians at about three o'clock, which would be, you know, a very full meal at different dishes, about four or five of them. And the Brits would also take this on, but they would also then have Barakana, which was the big dinner afterwards, which would be like, depending on your wealth and status,

could be a really sumptuous affair. Just again, I mean, it sounds like I'm obsessed with the meat consumption, and I am. I'm not a vegetarian, but I'm just astonished by it. It's just another gorgeous fact from this Lizzie Collingham book, which I recommend to everybody, is that, you know, some of the tables of some of the most wealthy in Britain in the 1700s we're now in,

were so vast and so big, and so much slaughter took place. to sort of fill these tables. Emma Roberts writes of this time that she was in India. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And as a companion to her married sister. And she was just seeing carcass after carcass coming out onto the table. And this book goes on to surmise that actually the East India Company bringing these eating habits

of the British squirearchy, as she puts it to India, created gentlemen who consumed as much as 74 kilograms of meat a year, compared to the average, which was about 40, and you had one or two of them reaching the incredible weight of 40 stone because of this diet in India. So one of the things that happens during this period of history as you move from the arrival of the Britson, India, in the 16th century through to the 18th century,

is that the time of dinner moves. We have a reference to Thomas Twining in 79, saying dinner was served at four, which is the same time that you say that Tiffin was happened. Tiffin, yeah. Yeah. This was much in the Indian style, he writes. He's visiting a French general called Benoit Duboyne.

So this is a sort of Franco-Indian household. And he says, dinner was very much in the Indian style, pilows and curries, variously prepared in abundance, fish, poultry and kid. The dishes were spread out over a large table, fixed in the middle of the hall, and were, in fact, a banquet for a dozen persons, although there was no one to partake it, but the general and myself. Wow. And that, again, is very much power for the course.

But then you see dinner sort of becoming later. Well, this barracano, is that what would it be? The big dinner, but I'm meaning big and kana meaning big eat. By 1805, Lord Wellesies reporting that his dinner hour is 5pm. And by 1830, Mrs. Pringle tells us it was 6.30 p.m. In 1846, Mrs. Clemens and Army Majors, wife, informs us that at 7 o'clock it was the usual time. So you see the time changing.

But no one eats later. than the moguls. And the moguls don't even begin to eat, as is often the case still in Delhi, rather like with the Spaniards until very late. And when I was writing the last mogul, I'll just read a little bit from this. This is Bahadash Haza, the last mogul emperor in the 1850s. And his dinner began no earlier than 8.30pm, when most of the British were already well tucked up in their beds. Quail, stew, veners and lamb, kidneys on sweet nun called Shirmal, yakni, fish kebads, and meat stewed and oranges were Zuff. first favourite dishes. Though on festive occasions, the Red Fork kitchens were capable of producing

an astonishing variety of Mughla cuisine. And the Basimir Keir, which is a wonderful book of the pleasures of the Mughal Court, describes 25 different varieties of bread, 25 different kinds of pilau and biryani and 35 different sorts of spiced stews, and 50 different puddings, as well as remarkable varieties of relishes and pickles, all to be eaten according to the Azami Akir to the sound of singers performing guzzles, while the fragrance of musk, saffron, sandalwood, and rosewood fills the air. But this is the point that I'd like to go. Before we go on to chilies, let's just talk about how people finish their meals. And Zuffer has a great fondness for orange marmalade, which he likes to have at the end of his dinner. And he's banned from having it

by his hakeem, his medical doctor, Hakeem Asanullah Khan. And Garland, and Garland. And Garland, Ghalib comments when he hears about this. Garlib is the great Urdu poet. He says that the only thing that a gentleman should have after dinner is a mango. And at one gathering, a group of Delhi intellectuals are discussing what the qualities of a good mango

should be. In my view, says Garlib, there are only two essential points about mangoes. They should be sweet and they should be plentiful. In his old age, Garlip became worried about his declining appetite for his favourite fruit and wrote to a friend to express his anxieties. He never ate an evening meal, he took

told his correspondent. Instead, on hot summer's night, he would sit down to eat the mangoes when my food was fully digested. And I tell you bluntly, I'd eat them until my belly was bloated and I could hardly breathe. Even now, I eat them at the same time of day, but never more than 10 or 12, or if they're of the large kind, only six or seven. I completely commend that way of eating mangoes. I do much the same myself. It gets even better. Just at the end, he says, he's writing to his friend talking about the pleasures of his life, and he talks about the And he goes on, there are 17 bottles of good wine in the pantry, he says. So I read all day and drink all night. Well, that's a way to live. I'm just going to read you another account and then we'll go to the

break and we'll come back because we haven't mentioned hotness. We have not mentioned the chili. That's very unlike you. And that's because it doesn't actually make an appearance yet, but it will. So just again, the kind of food, we're talking 1700s now, which Brits are experiencing. So either through their interface with sort of the moguls who like to put on a show and put on lots of dishes to impress them. But they sort of take that on themselves. And this is, have you ever come across a man called Frederick Shaw? Frederick Shore, I think, is the son of one of the governor generals. And he is, he's rather a dissident and writes against the East India Company. Yes. And it sort of starts with his judging them on how much they eat and just really thinking that they're a bit disgusting.

So this is this is his idea. Turkeys that you could not even see over. A round of beef boiled roast beef, stewed beef, loin of veal for a side dish and a roast big cap on as large as hens turkeys. Large bowls of curry and rice placed on the table. That was just the first course, after the outsized joints had been cleared, a second course of beef, steak, pigeon pie, told you about your pigeons,

chicken drumsticks, more curry and rice, quails, and autolands, which I don't even know what they are, piled up in hetacombs. Fruits and nuts were then placed on the table. Frederick Shaw was completely disgusted by this, And he described this idea of this show of plenty as being absurd and a universal practice in this country. And the fact that, you know, you would always have wine and beer along with this.

And you would have this twice a day. So you'd have it about Tiffin o'clock, about three or four o'clock, and then you would have it again later on in the day for Barakana. Emma Roberts, who I mentioned before, who was this wonderful witty writer who was in India at the time. Her digestion is shot to hell after a brief session. She can't bear it anymore. I'm not surprised if she was eating with Frederick Shaw.

I mean, so she sort of says to the servants in the place that she's staying, look, could I, you know, a hair has been hunted. All she wants is a roast hair for dinner. It's all she wants. So she sort of hands over this dead hair that's been freshly cold and says, could you just, you know, roast that for me for dinner? And then she comes out and it's nowhere there at all. Nothing is there. And she's, where, where's my hair? And they said, no, no, no, no piles of these huge piles of steaming meat.

She goes, and the servants say that's a poor man's dish. We don't put it on our master's table because it would be humiliating for him. So there's kind of this conspiracy to show, you know, just how much there is. And what is also very interesting, and you get this from the Lizzie Collingham book, is that what happens to the leftovers, because you can't possibly consume this much, right? But most Indians, most of the poor, won't eat this food. because again, you know, it's pork mixed with beef mixed with God knows what. So it's sort of distributed among the Christian poor, of whom there aren't that many.

And the rest is chucked away, just chucked away. So it is like, you know, you can see why Frederick Shaw and others like him are just appalled. Anyway, join us after the break when we come back and put a little bit of spice in life. The spice that matters, the spice I live for, chilly. Welcome back. So Anita was very worried that there wasn't enough hotness in the first half. I do like a little bit of hotness, yes. So we are going to talk about how you heat up your meal in India.

Now, it's an important part of the story that, of course, Chile only arrives in the 1540s in India with the Portuguese. But before then, India was well known as the home, as far as Europeans were concerned, of black pepper, which was the other great spice preceding the chili. and it's the major export through India. A lot of it comes actually from further east. There's a massive import to classical India of pepper from what we would call Indonesia, the East Indies. And Kerala was a major emporium, not just for Indian pepper, but for pepper from East Indies, from the islands like Run,

which where the nutmeg was from and other places. And in Sicily, in land, there is a wonderful, first century Roman mosaic that has a depiction of India. And she is this sort of large-breasted Bollywood figure that actually looks like it's based on an Indian picture of Yaxi or something of some Indian artistic model that they've borrowed. A Yaxi is what, for those who don't know? A voluptuous tree spirit that figures very prominently in the Buddhist start of the period. And behind her is a whole sort of foliage of rails of pepper vines. And it's clear that while quite a lot of the things in the picture like

elephants were rather unfamiliar to the artist, pepper vines was something he'd clearly seen or seen a very good picture of because they're very accurately depicted. And this is what the Romans came to India for. And at the time of Pliny and Strabo, that's early first century CE, Pliny writes that there are 250 vessels a year bringing these spices from Kerala to the Red Sea coast of Egypt. So Pliny the Elder is a puritanical naval commander from northern Italy, and he's particularly in sense that this drain of Roman gold into Indian pockets. He didn't like the taste of pepper, and he was unimpressed by the gemstones, which he says is the other thing that people were sending money to India to buy. And in his natural history, he describes India,

and I quote, the sink of the world's precious metals. There is no year which does not drain our empire of at least 55 million Silvest Assythi. The Silvers to Sershi is worth about a dollar today. So, 55 million dollars of Roman money goes to India to buy all this stuff. And interestingly, later on, you find that India Pepper gets as far as Hadrian's wall. There is a character called Gambak, son of Tapo, and he's spending two denarius, according to his little writing table, which turned up at the fort of Vindalanda in Northumbria, on Peppa. So it's reaching right across, even to an ordinary legionary stuck in the cold of Hadrian's wall, looking at these sort of Scots waving spears at him or picks waving spears at him from

the distance. And then later, when the Huns besieged Rome in the 5th century, they're bought off with a ransom of pepper, which is fascinating. Attila is paid off with black peppercorns. But it becomes an absolute essential of Roman cooking. And some of the Roman cookbooks often involve vast. quantities of pepper, even in the puddings. One of the first cookbooks, I think, is the Greek and Roman cookbook, now I'm going to say it wrong,

aren't I? Apicesterocinaria, which dates back, I think, to the fourth century. And it is filled with recipes that have not just pepper, interestingly, and pepper, I want to talk about what pepper looks like. You said it was very accurately represented. But for most people, pepper's just going to be this shriveled up black beady pepper corn. But that early Roman recipe book has pepper cumin. coriander and cinnamon. So I think that's, you know, very interesting. Again, following the trade

routes and changing the taste of the people. But the peppercorns that you talked about, you know, which were beautifully represented, they look like long catkins. You know, they're red, little sort of almost tiny mini grapes that come down into a narrow tip. If you've ever been lucky enough to go to Q Gardens, they have a lot of them in their hot house. And I was really shocked because I hadn't seen, you know, pepper in the wild before. But if you travel to Kerala as well, You know, they still grow an enormous amount of pepper there. And the original name for it when it came here was pipet longum or long pepper. And the English word pepper, I think, is derived from the Hindi word, which is what they called it, pipali.

So pepper, pipali, all of that as a gift from India, yeah. And this is a very, very early Indian export. There are apparently grains of Indian pepper found up the mummified nose of Pharaohramis II. So even in the third millennia BC, this is something which India is exporting. And in the Red Sea port, Beronique, which is where the Indian traders landed this stuff, they found whole rooms full of pots containing Indian peppercorns. And the English word pepper comes from the Tamil papali. So it was an early etymological link.

Yeah. I mean, I was looking at the cost of these spices in Roman times, and they were incredibly expensive in ancient times. you know, often valued more than their weight in gold. So a pound of pepper, you were just talking about, you know, Attila being paid in pepper. A pound of pepper could cost as much as a slave. Just to give you an idea, human life was worth a pound of pepper.

Saffron, by the way, saffron, you know, the crocus stamen that is used a lot in Indian cooking and in Palau's and you're now here a lot in Britain in the West. Saffron was worth its weight in silver. So just imagine that. These things were very, very valuable. But not just for their taste, though. They also thought they had medicinal properties as well, which is something we may come on to because there's a lot of thought behind what foods should go together as far as

Ayurveda is concerned, which is a very ancient Indian art of putting hot, cold, spicy and not spicy together. So the chili pepper, which is the thing that we now associate most with Indian heat, only arrives in India via the Portuguese, and it arrives in Goa in the 1540s. And at that time, there is a traveller who mentions that there are three separate varieties of Chile that have been newly imported into India and is being used all up the West Coast. And from that point, it spreads over the whole of the subcontinent. And the people who take it with them are the Marathas.

when the Mughal Empire begins to collapse after the death of Orang Zeb in 1707, the Marathas have already got a taste for the chili pepper, which they've got from Goa, which borders their lands. And it's their armies that take the Chile into North India in the course of the 18th century. Isn't that extraordinary? I had no idea about that before I read those. So, I mean, can we just sum that up with we have Columbus to thank for my joyous moments at table? Really? It's true.

And the other thing we should have, of course, talk about, if we're talking about food in Goa, is the Vindaloo. Oh, yes. Which is an extraordinary story. And turns out that Vindaloo is merely a Goan adaptation of a Portuguese dish. Yeah, this is thrilling because I thought it was maybe a Tamil word that had been corrupted, but it's not. This is amazing. The original Portuguese dish is called carne de vino and alos.

My Portuguese, I don't have any Portuguese, so I'm laughing from that. Okay. Just you know what? My philosophy is put on a hard hat and run at it fast. Okay. Carne da Vino et alos, which is meat cooked in wine vinegar and garlic. And Vindaloo is just an English corruption of a vino de alos. I think that's amazing because that is the ultimate curry-house dish today. Yeah. Of showing off, isn't it? A Vindaloo, a very, very hot curry. Gosh, okay, so that's completely disabute.

me of a notion. I did not know that. It's the Mughals who carry it north. And by the early 19th century, the people of Delhi have taken it into their lives. There's a wonderful description of people going to the steps of the Jamimazid in the early 19th century, where the Dastan go, the storytellers gather at the base of the steps. And according to some of these accounts, Delhi Wallers used to surprise visitors from outside by taking them there to eat without telling them about the pot of hot chilis with which Jani, the famous kebab maker of the Jabba Masjid, would marinate his kebabs. And there's a wonderful character that I write about in Last Mughal called Mulvi Muhammad Bukkah, who's the editor of the Delhi Urdu Akbar.

And he has a poet's son called Azad. He talks about taking a stranger who hadn't eaten for a whole day. He stretched his jaws wide and fell on the kebab. And instantly it was as if his brains had been blown out of his mouth by gunpowder. He let back with a howl. But the Delhi one who brought him replied, We live here only for the sharp taste. So the people of Delhi by 1900 had taken this on to be their thing,

that they were chili lovers. And Zuffer, the last Mughal emperor, is forbidden Chile by his doctor, Hakemastana Lakan. But has it anyway. And Hakeemakshn al-Khan in the palace diary has always been called to Zuffer's bedchamber, he's suffering terrible stomach complaints. And in the end, he promises that he really will give up the cayenne pepper in the 1852. Well, we all promise that. None of us mean it. My father was so alarmed. I think I can eat the hottest thing. I've never met anyone

who can eat hot a few than me. Honestly, that's an honest. I will challenge you to that any to hour in the summer when I'm back. You will melt. I have honestly cast iron, teflon, asbestos constitution. Have you traveled in northeast India? Have you had the Naga chili, which they have up in... Yes, I have a Naga chili sauce at home. But you haven't had the Naga Chili's as cooked by the Naga's? No, I haven't. That is true. But I have also, I have, with my scrambled egg,

Carolina Reaper sauce, which is the hottest chili on the planet. And guarantee you're going to lose this. This is for breakfast. Yeah, yeah. Like Zaffer, I promised that I wouldn't do that anymore, but I still do because it's so nice. Just one other thing on the traveling of the chili around India. What's very interesting is that it also becomes conflated with the characteristics of the people who eat it. So there is a North Indian scholar in the 1800s who says that the Marathas have a nature that was dry and hot because they put chilies and everything they eat.

And that this is what makes them sort of so warlike and determined in character. And in contrast, the Mughals eat, you know, rice, palaz, almond sweetmeats and central Asian fruit and therefore become soft and ineffectual. which is why, you know, the great warriors of the Deccan are able to defeat them. And there is something that lies in sort of ancient Hindu scripture with this, because what you eat, you know, as far as Ayurveda, it changes your temperament. I mean, have you come across all these different types of food. You have like Satva, Rajas and Tamas, different types of food, which can change your mood and you have to balance them completely.

And they all have different meanings. So Satva, which is kind of purity. It's purity, knowledge and harmony. It's, you know, goodness, joy, satisfaction. If you are pure, you are sadvik, aren't you? You are satvig, exactly. Rajas, which is passion, action, energy, motion. Rajiv is what you eat there.

It's a sort of much more luxurious thing. And Tamas, which I must eat a lot of, impurity, laziness and darkness is what you get from eating those food. But I wanted to look at what were the foods that sort of gave you there. So Satvik is all your fruits and veg, which is fine. Rajik is onions and garlic and chili. and Damasic foods, which make you sort of impure, dark and evil, meat, burgers, cheesecake. They put on this handy leaflet to tell me the error of burgers and cheesecake. Very, very refined foods, basically, is what they're saying.

But before we close, we should say again about some of the other things which the Brits and the Portuguese introduced to India. And they're quite surprising. So today, of course, we think of the alu, the potato, the humble potato. as being a quintessentially Indian vegetarian dish and sort of essentially in al-Piratas or Pau-Bahji or any of these basic Indian dishes, but it's not there until the Brits bring it. And when I was writing white moguls

and going through old James Patrick's letters, he goes to quite inordinate lengths to get potatoes to hydrabat because no one is growing it there. And then eventually he manages to get a patch going at the back of the residency and he grows it. And he says that he's had a little bit of,

first potatoes for two years in 1802 because there'd been no potatoes available. Here's the quote. I have grown now a good supply of potatoes, being a vegetable which I like very much, but have not tasted for two years or more. But even so, it's interesting what the other Brits eating in the residency, this is yet another list of excessive British eating. But Kirkpatrick has a sort of fascination with the amount that two of his colleagues eat. The doctor, the residency is called Dr. Yure.

and he's got a very hungry wife. And he writes, The young couple's consumption of tea and sugar alone is at least double mine. The Kansaman, the bearer, tells me that a couple of grilled chickens were regularly served up by their direction at breakfast table, and two foils boiled down to Mulligotoni's soup for their tiffin. The consequence of which, as might well be expected, is that the lady was seized by a fever, which, according to Green and Nure's account, absolutely endangered her life. It has now left her, although extremely weak, the Kanserman has received.

instructions to provide daily, calves-feet jellies until further orders, and you may recollect from experience, he writes to his brother, what a costly dish these carved-feet jellies are. Mrs. I is complaining of lack of appetite, but still managed to put away every day poultry, rice, milk butter, vegetables,

antsy, and see, antsy, and see, as well as two plum cakes, a goose, turkey and ducks innumerable, beside fowls and mutton. You go, girl. Also, James Kirkpatrick. I mean, I love James. Kirkpatrick, thanks to you. But when eudogizing about potatoes and how much, you know, he misses

potatoes, he does also notice that actually, you know, the Indians won't have them. They won't touch them because they think that they're weird and odd and they're not categorized by Ayobedic medicine. So, you know, all that stuff that I just read you, they're not on the chart. You know, they're not burgers and cheesecake. Those, it's not there. So they won't eat them and George Watt noticed at the same time that Indians thought that they caused indigestion and flagellants. So they wouldn't touch them. They didn't fit in the chart. And Orthodox Jains refused potatoes. They don't like anything that's a root vegetable, do they? They don't have garlic and onions. Generate life, you know, so it can grow. You know, something can grow out of a potato.

Just to conclude, as we've had Mrs. Eau nearly dying from excessive consumption, that many of the Brits, unsurprisingly, do die from excessive consumption, having had this incredible overeating. and there are two main causes of this. One is, of course, just sort of dirty water. In the 18th century, they don't really know yet how to purify water. And so quite often, the Brits either drink beer for breakfast or they have what they call burnt wine. Do you know about this? Oh, this sounds so disgusting.

They put boiling gold or hot gold into wine. Hot gold, ingot. Yeah. I mean, I was trying to understand this. Look, it can't be molten gold, because that's... kill you. But are we talking about like something that's just white hot that's been heated up and the truth is to purify. And the alternative to that rather than having sort of purified water or wine is just to drink more alcohol. So people start drinking a breakfast at this period. And no surprise,

given that that in 1700s, it's estimated that a third of all hospital cases came from liver complaints. Really? Yes, and so here's a typical day, according to David Burton, in Calcutta. And the writer says that he has six friends who've got dysentery, and they're blaming it all on the climate. And the writer is unsurprised by their suffering when their lifestyle eating was a light diffin soup, several kinds of carried meat and generous quantities of beer and sherry. Then they go and play cricket for three to four hours before coming back for a four-hour dinner. Good Lord.

This carries on right up until the end of the ranch. And no wonder those cemeteries you see all over the subcontinent, so well-stocked with young colonials. Now, look, so I think that's a very good place to leave it with flatulence, liver disease and stomach upsets and biliousness. Why don't you join us for another installers? We take you through Indian food in the Rage in the 1800s and 1900s. Till then, just goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. Should make a burping noise and it's goodbye from me. William Tarrymple.