First prepare the fruit: stone and cut the raisins in three or four pieces: wash and stem the sultanas. Wash, pick and dry the currants.

It is 1959 and I am sitting cross-legged on the table in the back verandah of our house in Sri Lanka. I am seven years old and today my grandmother, Ada, our cook, Rosalind, and I will make the Christmas cake.

Rosalind has anchored to the table the cast iron hand mincer Ada has sensibly bought. Ada’s fingers have grown arthritic and cutting anything into small pieces is painful. I will inherit her arthritis and use an electric food – processor in later years..

Rosalind feeds the mincer with handfuls of the fruit, each in turn. As Rosalind cranks the mincer I watch, fascinated, as the fruits mix together into rich, brown worms extruded onto a plate. From time to time she presses the fruit down into the funnel of the mincer. I am terrified her fingers will get caught.

Cut the pumpkin preserve, ginger preserve, and chow chow in small pieces.

Rosalind has taken the thin raffia string from around some brown ceramic pots with bright coloured Chinese labels on top. The ginger is preserved in a thick, tangy, sugary syrup. The pumpkin comes as small, pale yellow, almost white cubes covered in white sugar. The chow chow, like the ginger, is in a thick syrup. I never stop to wonder back then why the pumpkin isn’t bright orange like the pumpkins Rosalind curries sometimes. I never stop to wonder what on earth chow chow is. I never stop to ask what these Chinese preserves are doing in a British fruitcake. I know nothing back then of the more than 500 years of Chinese silk traders living cheek-by-jowl with Sri Lankans in the crowded bazaar streets of Pettah. I am yet to realise how cultures and cuisines cross-fertilise through simple daily actions between people more deeply than through government policy – a plate of food passed over the wall, a piece of calico exchanged for two or three mangoes. I will later learn a term for this coined by the Australian social anthropologist Ghassan Hage: everyday multiculturalism. Right now, all I know is the goldenness of the preserves shining in the afternoon sun and the delicious pungency tingling my nose as the preserves also now are minced.

Shred the candied peel finely and chop the cajunuts. Mix the different kinds of fruit together with the flour. Put the butter and sugar into a large basin and beat well (1 hour) with a wooden spoon till very light and smooth.

In front of me on the kitchen table is the basin. It’s enormous, shallow but wide; brass, hand-beaten. You can run your palm around its gleaming inside and feel the dimpling from the mallet strokes that made it. I grasp the mixing ladle. It’s like a cudgel, a thick cylinder of dark smooth wood ending in a fat bulb. It’s easily as thick as my arm, but surprisingly light. This is my first job in the cake making: creaming the butter and sugar. The mixture is like sand at the shoreline on the beach: grainy and wet. I imagine the great sugar castle I could make from it.

As I stir, the mixture gets paler and sloppier, like the cream topping on the buns the bakers down the lane make. I am allowed to wander from the house for hours on end during the day. Sometimes I end up at the bakers’ watching the men in their sarongs and singlets playing card games and drinking whisky while the loaves bake. Is this where I begin to desire men? Certainly, there is something exciting about the sight of black hair fringing the top of the necks of singlets; the gleam of sweat on the bare arms; the way sarongs hang loosely open between their legs. But it’s all just feelings for which I have no words with which to make sense. But I sense what I am feeling is wrong and that’s enough for now.

Then add the egg yolks one at a time, beating well after each is added. Mix in the semolina, gradually.

Semolina. Another curious element of the recipe. Most cakes in the European tradition use flour as the main component and so do the other cakes in Ada’s recipe book. Semolina flour is made from durum wheat, the wheat that’s used to make pasta and couscous. In Indian cooking, though, it’s often used to make cakes. And so the Christmas cake tells more of Sri Lanka’s history. This time it’s about Moghul empires in northern India in whose courts those central Asian conquerors ate sweet cakes made from their native wheat. Like court food in other cultures, these cakes transgressively moved beyond the palace into the home. From kitchen to kitchen the sweets travelled south, crossing the Palk Strait separating Sri Lanka from India, into the Tamil dominated north of the island. Durum wheat was displaced with the coming of the Europeans bringing their alien winter wheat from Europe. I like to see the semolina in the Sri Lankan Christmas cake as a subtle culinary act of enduring anti-colonialism.

But I am getting ahead of my nine-year old self again. All I know as I sit cross-legged on the table, wedging the basin between my knees is that the semolina is making it harder to stir the batter.

Then add the fruit, cadjunuts, and spices.

That’s what the Europeans came for. Spices. Cinnamon in particular from Sri Lanka. For centuries the spice trade into Europe was controlled by Arab merchants. They carried the spices up through the middle east to Venice. The Venetians on-sold the spices into the courts of Europe at exorbitant prices. It was the Portuguese who first decided to break this monopoly, sending Columbus off, in the wrong direction as it happened, to find the spice islands of the east. They were more successful with Vasco de Gama who went south and around the bottom of Africa and ended up in Calicut on the south west coast of India. Then the Dutch arrived with the first global corporation, the Dutch East India Company and displaced the Portuguese. Neither of these two nations sought to rule Sri Lanka: They set up trading posts and entered into marketing contracts with the rajahs of the country. When the British arrived, they were in the full flush of empire building through military force and ownership. Sri Lanka became a British colony and remained so for a century and a half until 1949.

Lastly, the brandy, rosewater, bees honey and syrup (vanilla and essence of almonds).  

Arabian influences now. Rosewater, the scent of paradise. Bees honey and almonds, foods of paradise.

The whites of 8 – 10 eggs beaten up to a stiff froth. Ready a tin – not too high – lined with 2 or 3 folds of white paper well buttered. It is best to have about six folds of paper at the bottom. Pour the mixture into the prepared tin and bake in a moderate and steady oven from four to five hours.

 Is this when I become a cook? Or is it when I hang around Rosalind’s kitchen taking a turn at grinding spices, tasting the curry gravy and offering suggestions for improvements – more salt, more chilli, more dried fish. Or when as a teenager in Australia I come home from school and make a ham, cheese and tomato jaffle as a snack. Or my first paid catering job preparing a Sri Lankan feast for a friend’s birthday. I don’t know. I only know that somewhere along the way this millennia old practice of transforming combinations of plant and animal matter into fuel for the body and soul became as natural and necessary as breathing.

Ada and Rosalind take the cake across the road to my uncle’s for baking. We don’t have an oven. Back on the verandah, I run my finger around and around inside the basin, coating my finger with the deliriously complex flavours melded into something so much more than its parts.

Ada and I are Sri Lankan Burghers, a hybrid race: a mixture of Portuguese, Dutch, Sinhala and Tamil. We are the westernised middle class that worked for the British colonial administration in Sri Lanka. You can read the Christmas cake as a methaphor for we Burghers if you like. I am too busy licking to philosophise.

When Sri Lanka became independent, Sinhala nationalism took hold. We burghers were clearly not welcome any more. I can understand that. The Burgher disapora settled in Britain or its former colonies – Canada and Australia mainly.

It’s in Australia that the answer comes to the question what is chow chow. It’s choko, the fruit of the vine that defined that time of my arrival in Australia as it grew wild over the outside dunny. How appropriate that this multicultural cake should all the time have contained in it an ingredient from the future, a future in which another cultural strain would be added to the hybridity that is my nature and now the nature of my children and grandchildren.

It is mid-day in early December some time in the 2000s. The summer’s heat is not oppressive with humidity here in Australia as it was on a day in December 1959 in Sri Lanka.  

I open Ada’s recipe book and turn to page 95: Christmas Cake.

First prepare the fruit. Stone and cut the raisins in three or four pieces; wash and stem the sultanas. Wash, pick and dry the currants…

You can hear the podcast here.

Read the recipe

The post How to make a Sri Lankan Christmas cake appeared first on Buth Kuddeh.

A paper written for the Cookbooks as History Conference, National Centre for Research into the History of Food and Wine, University of Adelaide, 2006

‘Grandmother was a great cook. But then most Burgher ladies of a generation ago were experts in the culinary arts. In those days the housewife provided the family with excellent traditional fare – whether it was in savouries, in sweetmeats or richly garnished rice dishes.’

Deloraine Brohier Not quite the Same, not quite the Other, she stands on that undetermined threshold place where she constantly drifts in and out.
Minh-ha Trin

How to make a Sri Lankan Christmas cake
The bowl was enormous, shallow but wide; brass, hand-beaten, you could run your hand along its polished inside and still feel the small round bumps of the mallet strokes. It was never used for anything but making the Christmas cake. We three brothers would sit cross-legged on top of the table in the back verandah, the bowl in the middle, grasping the mixing spoon; not really a spoon, more like a cudgel, a thick tapering cylinder of dark smooth wood ending in a fat bulb like an inverted medicine dropper. It was easily as thick as my child-arm.

Into the bowl would go first the sugar and the butter, to be creamed till it was pale yellow and bubbled like lava. Then egg yolks, one by one, bleeding their sunspore into the mix. Semolina next, tiny grains like couscous, they would work their way annoyingly into our clothes. Now it began to be hard to stir and the three of us would hold the cudgel together – ugh-ugh! Suddenly, our nostrils prickled with the sharp scent of chopped preserved ginger, chow chow pickle, and preserved pumpkin that came from China in small blue-green glazed octagonal pots, encased in a web of straw which looked ridiculously fragile but could cut your finger if you were careless. Granny would toss handfuls into the bowl, followed by raisins, currants, sultanas, candied peel, chopped pineapple, crushed cashewnuts, all lightly dusted with flour.

The mixture now was nearly impossible the move with the cudgel; we got to our knees, straining with our whole upper body to move this thickening, gravelly mass. Now a fine dusting of crushed spices the colour of chocolate – cinnamon, cardamom, cloves . Next, a sherry glassful of rosewater (musky, swoony), one of honey (thick, dark gold, some comb still embedded), one of brandy and a little pineapple juice if the batter still needed moistening. The mixture became more liquid.

Finally, folding in stiff foamed egg whites, a few more stirs and it was ready to pour into the square baking pans which we boys had lined with buttered brown paper. Then granny and Rosalind walked the pans across the road to Uncle Arthur’s oven – we only had a three burner kerosene stove. We boys stayed behind to lick the bowl, fingers sliding around the edges, coming up coated in yellow/black/purple, sweet, tangy, strongly perfumed batter.

Four or five hours later, an ekel (a straw) taken from the kitchen broom having been poked into the cake and having come out clean, the finished cakes were walked back home, shaken out onto racks, and left to cool.

The making of the Christmas cake was the miracle play whose drama and mystery I can unhesitatingly say made of me a believer in the materially and emotively transformative power of cooking. Granny at these times had all the power and mystique of a high priestess, and her cookery book all the gravity of a sacred text as she ran her finger down the list of ingredients. I longed one day to enact its rites. (Can’t half tell I was brought up Catholic!)

Burgher buggers make better bastards

If hybridity is heresy, then to blaspheme is to dream.
Homi Baba

The book is mine now, handed down to me by my mother. I’ve turned to it frequently over the years as I try to recapture and reproduce the food of my formative years in Sri Lanka, for my enjoyment and that of my family and friends.

Somewhere along the way it became a significant text of another kind. It became a way to interrogating the identity I was developing as a Dutch Burgher, a minority Sri Lankan ethnic community of which Ada was also a member, who undertook our own diaspora with the rise of Singhalese nationalism in the late 1950s-1970s. More than this, it has become for me a way of re-inscribing into the narratives of colonialism, particularly British colonialism, a subaltern people who continue to be overlooked in postcolonial writing or elided into the subalteneity of others. This paper is a part of that project.

So who are the Dutch Burghers (diaspora notwithstanding Burgherdom continues)? Most straightforwardly, we are the descendants of employees of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) who chose to remain in Sri Lanka when the British took over government of the country. The employees of the VOC had been vrijburgers&, free citizens. Those who stayed behind recanted their oaths of allegiance to the VOC and the Netherlands. Many of those who stayed had intermarried with Singhalese, Tamils, and the smaller communities in Sri Lanka. They weren’t all Dutch as the VOC employees included German, Swiss, French, Hungarian and Italian. Over time, the term Burgher became a convenient way for the British to distinguish themselves from their subjects who were the descendants of the Dutch and Portuguese. The word became the ethnic or racial label to describe the ‘people in-between’. The Portuguese were also largely mestizos, descendants of the intermarriage between the Portuguese militia who were the first Europeans to settle in Sri Lanka and the indigenous communities. The descendants of British citizens who intermarried were never classed as Burghers, however. We Burghers are, then, in the words of the alliterative epithet I learned as a child, and which heads this section, bastards, in the sense of hybrids. But for me, the recovery of my Burgherdom has become an opportunity to celebrate Burgher bastardism/hybridity through what Homi Baba has called its ‘enunciative spaces’, spaces which are ‘continually, contingently, “opening out”, remaking the boundaries, exposing the limits of any claim to a singular or autonomous sign of difference-be it class, gender or race…assignations of social differences-where difference is neither One nor the Other but something else besides, in-between…‘ Ada’s cookery book is just such a space as I want to show.

Ada Henrietta Ferdinands was born in 1883, the sixth of the fourteen children of Frederick William Ferdinands and Henrietta Jansz. Dutch Burghers, like Frederick were held in some esteem and would be entitled to high-ranking jobs (but not as high as the British in most cases). Frederick was a Station Master; Henrietta a wife, mother and homekeeper. Ada remained at home until she took up her post as a governess to the children of a tea plantation manager. It was during this time that she met and fell in love with Lawrence Isidore de la Harpe, a Dutch Burgher of French descent. It was his second marriage. Lawrence was a doctor and served as the Judicial Medical Officer in the southern town of Galle and the surrounding districts. Ada was the Secretary of the YWCA in Galle and also played the organ in the Dutch Reform Church there. My mother Celia was one of two children from the marriage, born in 1922.

My memories of Ada are few; she died when I was six. They cluster around two things: sitting in her room in our house playing with some ornaments she had while she read her bible; and the making of the Christmas cake. So her cookery book is the only way I have to recover the life of a woman whose significance to my life I have only come to realize through writing this paper.

Ada’s gift

‘Taken as a whole, a woman’s recipe book is the record of her life. The voice and script of the writer inscribed indelibly on the pages become synonymous with the text…The act of reading and cooking from her book makes possible a veritable communion with the writer.’
Janet Theophano

‘Like any generalization about a feminine literary tradition, generalizations about a feminine cookbook tradition would be plagued with theoretical pitfalls and irritatingly insistent exceptions.’
Susan Leonardi

The recipe books Theophano refers to in the quotation that opens this section are ‘books crammed with printed clippings and handwritten notes…written out in longhand by named or anonymous women’. In these books a woman’s friends might write recipes of theirs that she liked or she might copy into it recipes from other cookery books or women’s magazines. The result was often a collage ‘an assortment of foods in no particular order’. Some detailed the organization of the household servants. Others included ‘ornamentation (including mock title-pages, graphics, drawings, dried flowers), magazine clippings (typically articles and poetry on an array of subjects), and interleaves (notes, poems, articles, recipes, accounts and other ephemera, handwritten or printed)’.

These compendia are fertile ground for reading the lives of their authors. In comparison, Ada’s is a relatively barren text. It’s an undistinguished exercise book of the kind I remember using at school; red cloth-and-cardboard covered, 156 quarto pages, 19 blue lines per page with a red margin down the left side. The cover now shows signs of age and use. It’s blotched pink with rubbing, and there are amoeba-shaped water marks, but on it you can faintly see the words ‘Cookery Book’ written in block letters. The letters don’t have the fluidity and grace of the text, even given one is block the other cursive; I don’t think Ada wrote them. Who did write them remains open; my mum didn’t and doesn’t know who else may have. Apart from this there is no dedication or introduction to the book, nothing to distinguish it should you take it down from a shelf until you open it and find on page 1 the heading Soups etc. and the first entry Dhal soup.

So far so straightforward. But there is for me a mystery at the heart of the book. The book is divided into sections – Soups, Fish, Egg in different forms, right through to Selected Recipes which is mostly a collection of cakes, jams, chutneys and pickles. The structure parallels that of recipe books published at the time, for example, the Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book, edited by Hilda Deutrom and first published in 1929, and which remains the single most cited cookery book by Dutch Burghers.

Not so unusual still, then. But here’s the thing. The recipes in the body of the book flow in a continuous stream. Each recipe nuzzles up to the next, and each discrete section butts firmly up against the next; Egg in different forms ends on page 24 and Sauces begins immediately on page 25 and so on. There are two lines left blank at the most at the end of any recipe within a section, and a bare half page between sections, if any at all. The Index at the back of the book also allows for no additional entries as it rigorously catalogues each recipe and section according to its numbered page. Ada’s recipes stop halfway in the book. Here my mother has taken over and the book from here looks more like those Theophano looked at – she has pasted recipes cut out from newspapers and magazines, pasted in recipes written by her or friends, and she has also gone back into Ada’s text and made some notes as she adapted particular recipes – yes, the Christmas cake in particular – to the conditions she found in Australia in the early 1960s.

The inescapable conclusion, taking into consideration the body of the text and the structure and execution of the Index, is that at some time in her life, Ada sat down and wrote the cookbook from start to finish. My mum doesn’t remember well when Ada wrote her cookery book, and Ada did not date the book herself. My mum thinks Ada may have written it during the time she lived with her son and his wife, which would put it in the mid 1950s. Mum says that Ada didn’t have any recipe cards or notes but would have written the recipes from memory. If that’s true, then Ada’s memory and capacity for pre-organisation of her thoughts was prodigious. There are no more than a half dozen places where it is evident she went back and added a comment or a further direction to a recipe; under a recipe for Thamboom Hodie a slanting entry reads ‘Good for invalids’ in the margin beside a recipe for Drumsticks she has added ’10 drumsticks, seeds too if tender‘. She never added a single recipe after Pineapple Preserve on page 110. though she lived for a few years past the guessed time of its writing.

Her book, then, is a hybrid as she was, sitting somewhere between the haphazard intimacy of the cookery books Theophano and others explore, and the instructional formality of mass circulation published cookery books of her time. Why did she write this book at this time and in this way? It was not a book for her daily practice, as domestic cookbooks of this kind generally are; she was no longer actively involved in cooking (always excepting the Christmas cake) or managing a household My mum has no answer for me and the book itself is silent on this at least. But two things may throw some light here. When she began to write the book Ada would have been in her 70s, and it was around this time, too, that she was diagnosed with bowel cancer (mum’s memory is not so good any more and she can’t date the diagnosis any clearer); she died in 1958.

Perhaps then the book is for this: a woman, in her senior years, perhaps sensing or knowing that she had not long to live, sitting down and setting down accumulated cookery knowledge as her bequest to her children and her children’s children. If so, then my initial hesistancy in going along with Theophano’s characterization of women’s domestic cookery books as acts of deliberate literary creation flies out the window and I am left in awe of Ada’s gift.

Dhal soup and other enunciative spaces

“Botanical, culinary and migratory histories can make a mockery of ‘mosaic multiculturalism’ in general. They can show how cuisines are continually hybridizing processes rather than fixed things. They can show that the components mixed together in any hybridizing process are themselves always hybrid. And they can show that ingredients, knowledges, technologies and practices – culinary or otherwise – cannot have any straightforward ‘origins’ ”
Cook,Crang,and Thorpe

I want now to reverse what Ada did, to read back out from the text into the life, or at least the part of the life of which the text allows a reading. In doing this, I want to work from within Heidegger’s concept of Lichtung, (at least, as interpreted by Leela Ghandi) ‘a bringing to light which is also a clearing of space…that enables the most restrictive human consciousness to experience the simultaneity of the familiar and the uncanny, the established and the emergent, home and not-home, the humane, and, equally, the barbaric’. To do so, it seems to me, is the appropriate way to create the enunciative spaces within which to celebrate Burgher hybridity.

Unapologetic, if not yet celebratory, hybridity confronts the reader/cook from the first recipe in Ada’s book.

Dhal soup
½ “chundu” [sic] of dhal. Put it to boil in about 6 tea-cups of water – Put in with it (less not more), of a dessert-spoonful of coriander roughly ground, same quantity of Maldive fish well ground, 2 small or 1 large tomato, salt, celery, cinnamon, and any other vegetables, such as carrots. When reduced to about 4 cups, put in about 2 table-spoonfuls of thin coconut milk, and keep on stirring for some time. Then strain and temper with a good amount of red onions’.

Soup, in the sense of a particular category of liquid food, has no precursor in pre-European Sri Lankan meals. It is absent from the discussion by Sri Lankan food historian Doreen Alles of traditional foods. Rasam or pepper water is a spiced liquid that is drunk in some Indian cuisines, including Sri Lankan Tamil, but it is drunk during a meal as a digestive and not as a food. Similarly, canjis/congees, with a pre-European heredity, have more in common with porridges than with soups. The nearest equivalent to this dhal soup in pre-Europeanised South Asian foods is sambhar, a thickish dipping or pouring broth for dosai and idli, fermented ground lentils as a pancake and a steamed cake. Sambhar happens to be based on dhal, and it isn’t hard to see in the dhal soup a hybridizing of sambhar and split pea soups familiar from European cuisines, with dhal being a ready local substitute for peas. Is your head spinning yet? Because past this simple substitution, things get very hybrid indeed.

Maldive fish is a flavouring and thickening agent in Sri Lankan cuisine whose preparation of importation from Manaar in Sri Lanka was noted by Baldeus in the 1670s. It is bonito that has been boiled, smoked and sun-dried till rock hard, hence the need to grind it well, a very different process to those which create it’s cousins in South Asian cuisines, fish sauce and blachang, and to that which produced Roman garum. Maldive fish, however, being a solid, is used more extensively than these cousins and is one of the fundamentals of Sri Lankan cooking in sambols, mallungs (generally sauté’s of chopped green vegetables), and snacks (like vadai, deep-fried lentil cakes), often featuring roughly pounded so there is still some crunch to it.

The other ubiquitous Sri Lankan flavouring that has found its way into the dhal soup is cinnamon. True cinnamon, Cinnamomum zeylanicum, is native to Sri Lanka, and it was for control of the entry of this spice in particular into the European and Mediterranean markets that the Portuguese, the Dutch and the British in succession first developed trade settlements and then colonized Sri Lanka. Arguably then, cinnamon is the direct cause of the presence of Burghers in Sri Lanka. It’s a delicious temptation to read its insinuation into the soup as a triumph of the Oriental in polluting the Occidental.

But the appropriation of foodstuffs, as hinted at in the quote opening this section, goes both ways. There is the tomato, unthinkable before 1505 when the Portuguese first dropped anchor in Galle, and now as much a part of South Asian cuisines as that other Portuguese gift, chillies, absent from this dhal soup, but entrenched in much of Burgher cuisine as it is in Sri Lankan cuisine generally.

The ingredient measures are hybrid, too; a chundu is an old Sri Lankan measure based on a tin cylinder but more often in Ada’s time a used cigarette tin; a tea-cup could only be a meaningful measure when tea became established as an everyday beverage among the Britain in the late 19th century; a dessert-spoonful only makes sense in cultures that have a concept of dessert, which Sri Lanka did not have pre European engagement (sweets, yes, but not desserts as a particular category requiring a particular instrument); tablespoons as a measure can only originate and make sense within a culture that eats meals at a table and in which spoons are used to eat meals with, neither of which prevailed in Sri Lanka pre-European intervention.

Taking these elements together, I celebrate this humble dhal soup as a wonderfully enunciative space within a cuisine that continually performs Lichtung. Ada’s cookery book is a whole architecture of such spaces not only within a recipe, but as the recipes nuzzle up against each other: Salmon rice cutlets without the faintest hint of spice sit contentedly next to Spiced salmon with its souse of cloves, peppercorns, mace and chillies; Corned beef, lightly fragrantly spiced with cloves, cinnamon and nutmeg sits back to back with Karamanache beef with 12 roasted and powdered red chillies, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, ginger, curry leaves, and saffron.

Burgher food is often like this. Deloraine Brohier says ‘In savouries, the Burghers excelled in the patellos or curry patties, the dainty pastry filled delicacy is Portuguese in name and origin. The bollo cutlet or frikadella is more of a Dutch origin but spiced up in Sri Lanka with green chillie, garlic and the small red onion. In sweetmeats, the Burgher household wife excelled in love cake, bolofiado and breudher. Specialties of curry dishes were carmenache or the smore, while in rice dishes the lamprais was a very special meal of a Burgher household’. Bolofiado (also spelt Bol Fiado or Bolo Folhado) is of Portuguese origin, with rosewater and cashews snuck in. Breudher (spelt Broeder in Ada’s book) is a bready cake, presumably of Dutch origin, though it’s form is like panettone, even to the use of a fluted mould, and is customarily eaten at New Year with lashings of butter and slices of red rinded Dutch Edam cheese. Smore is a pot roast flavoured with lime pickle, coriander, cumin, fennel, cinnamon, and chillies, and coconut milk as the cooking medium. Love Cake is another semolina based cake, again with rosewater and cashews, which most likely is of Arab origin. But there are also in Ada’s book very straightforward recipes for dishes like Butter Cake, Broiled Beef of Mutton, Vegetable soup, none of which have any truck with spice, dry fish, chillies or coconut.

Hybridity reaches its apogee in the two great celebratory dishes of the Burghers. In Lampraya (Ada’s term, more usually written as Lamprais), the padi fieldworkers transportable lunch of boiled rice, dhal and one curry wrapped in a banana leaf meets the Indonesian Dutch rijstafel, literally rice table. A bed of pillau (pilaf) rice with raisins, rampa (pandanus leaf), cardamoms and cinnamon is boiled in stock made from parboiling four meats – chicken, pork, mutton and beef. The rice is then piled with a heavily spiced curry made from the meats, frikadells/frikadella, ash plantain curry, chilli sambol, cucumber and onion sambol, prawn blachang, with a splash of thick coconut milk on top. The whole is wrapped in banana leaf and baked.

The Christmas cake takes a bog standard fruitcake, ramps up the spice content, and widens the pool of sources to include elements from the Chinese – preserved ginger and chow-chow pickle; and Arab traders – semolina, instead of wheatflour, rosewater, cinnamon, nuts, honey, citrus flavourings were all common ingredients of Arabic cakes and sweets, but they may also have entered the Christmas cake via European adoption of these flavourings through the constant contact between Christians and Muslims in the Iberian peninsula.

But hybridity doesn’t stop at the individual items of food; it orders the meals in the day. My cousin, Patsy Alvis describes the meals of her childhood like this:

‘Breakfast- hoppers, stringhoppers, pittu etc…All of these were served with kiri hodhi & sambols. These breakfast foods became popular as dinner party fare much later. Lunch was rice, beef or fish curry (hardly ever chicken) two or three vegetables curried, mallung & a fry- dry fish or salted fish (jaadi) or maybe sausage (lingus). Tiffin was an afternoon snack- bread butter & jam or maybe pancakes with a coconut filling dropped scones (pikelets) or if the baker had any small cakes. Late in the evening was dinner- a meal with an English influence- soup followed by stews, mince, rissoles, pies etc. Dessert was not of the ice cream type- very few homes had frigs. There baked custards blancmange& jam, stewed fruit & custard & seaweed jelly usually made on coconut milk or fresh fruit’.

The order is the same as that of British colonial households in the Raj years, and Dutch colonials between the World Wars in the first half of the 20th century.

It’s in such an order that soup can take its comfortable and rightful place, at dinner, where the Burgher hybrid/subaltern performs as a European. But of course, those Burgher bastards can’t perform Europeanism without disturbing its straitjacket and the soup is as likely to be a bland mutton broth as it is to be the wondrously named Thamboom Hodie, concocted of coriander, cumin, caraway, pepper, turmeric, cinnamon, onions, garlic, ginger, Maldive fish, tomato, curry leaves and green chillies cooked up in coconut milk and soured with tamarind or lime or goraka (gamboge). And lest this seem all one way, that breakfast of stringhoppers (steamed mats of rice vermicelli) was very likely to be accompanied by scrambled eggs to which fresh chopped onion and green chillie had been added.

This ordering of meals is not apparent from Ada’s book, only the order of the European performed dinner through its replication in the structuring of the sections of the book as a whole. But this is not the only aspect of Burgher culinary culture that is hidden in Ada’s book.

Two other questions present themselves. Where did Ada get her recipes from? It’s a question particularly pertinent to the recipes that bear not a trace of any European influence in either ingredients or method of cooking – Karamanache, Saper Dhom (a fish curry, in effect), Pork curry, Brinjal pachchadee (a pickle) Mango temperado (also a pickle), Flah or wat-a-lapa (a steamed coconut milk custard of likely Persian origin usually rendered as vlah or wattalappam).

And then, did Ada actually do any cooking?

To deal with the first question. Theophano identifies the production of the domestic cookbooks she studied as ‘a communal affair. Women then as now were exchanging recipes for food and medicines…In the course of day-to-day life, by exchanging recipes and other household advice, women generated their culinary knowledge collaboratively and wrote their cookbooks cooperatively.’ Ada’s cookery book has no ascription of the recipes to help the reader identify the social networks that generated them, but some surmises can be made.

The Burghers of Ada’s generation were the product of 400 years of intermarriage between the Singhalese, Tamils, Moors, Portuguese, Dutch and the other Europeans in the employ of the VOC. (The Moors of Sri Lanka are the descendants of Arab traders. There have been substantial Arab communities in Sri Lanka since at least the mid 13th century, and certainly Arab trade contact well before this. ).

For many, this intermarriage was a business necessity. Pomerantz and Topik put it this way:

‘Success for many Europeans in Asia also demanded intermarrying with the local population…Even though the British and Dutch agents represented some of the first modern capitalist enterprises organized as joint stock companies, they relied on the traditional means of business alliances: marriage’.

Then, too, the South Asian and South East Asian trading posts of the European powers were not attractive places for European women to migrate too. European men again were willing in these circumstances to take indigenous partners.

Undoubtedly the women entering these marriages, certainly the earliest of them, brought into their households the foods of their communities, as did the Indian wives of men in the employ of the British East India Company. Over the years, it’s undoubtedly the case that mothers passed these on to their daughters and shared them with others in the Burgher community much as Theophano’s women did.

Ada may well have swapped recipes herself and either written them down as hers, or adapted them and put her versions down in the cookery book. She may also have collected recipes from newspapers and magazines of her time and transcribed them, adapted or not, into the cookery book. She may have tried recipes from other cookery books, like Deutrom’s and again written them down adapted or not into her cookery book. These are all practices Theophano identifies as common to the writers of the domestic cookery books she studied.

But there is still one other source, and that source also provides in part an answer to the question of just how much cooking Ada herself did.

The subaltern’s subaltern

[He] would sit in the sunlight drinking beers, which he ordered ice-cold, and finishing them before the sweat evaporated from the surface of the bottle.
Michael Ondaatje

Different race and class (and gender), servants illustrated the otherness of the colonized subject in its most poignant clarity. E Locher-Scholten

When I began this paper, I thought I knew where I was heading, a celebration of the lives of Burgher women through their food which then became the grand plan for Lichtung and the creation of the enunciative spaces of the hybrid. I hadn’t counted on the consequences of engaging with Lichtung.

As I went back through the recipes in Ada’s book, I became aware that missing from it were recipes for the substantial part of what I actually ate during an ordinary day in Sri Lanka. Where were the recipes for the pol sambols, mallungs, fish curries, vegetable curries, stringhoppers, pittu and the hundred other dishes that I consumed with such pleasure so regularly?

What I had ignored, was the truth of the production of the Burgher table. Ada, Deloraine Brohier, Doreen Alles, my mother, were not the ones who actually did the majority of the daily cooking, nor does my Burgher second cousin living currently in Sri Lanka. The servants in the Burgher household, like Rosalind, first my ayah (nanny) and later our cook, are the subaltern’s subalterns. They never speak for themselves; at best they are spoken about or for. More often though, they are not any part of the story told. Yet large parts of the story cannot happen without them. Where would my curry lunches of schooldays have been without Rosalind to cook them and Appuhamy to bring them to me, riding his bicycle with tiffin containers on the luggage rack? From whom does Michael Ondaatje’s father, sitting in the sunlight on the verandah of his wife’s house, order his beers? Would Ondaatje’s mother have ‘marched off through the tea estate” in the night with her children ‘bundled up’ to escape another of her husband’s drunken ‘tirades’ if there hadn’t been four servants on whose shoulders they were carried? And of course, Burgher women of Ada’s generation and before, like the memsahibs of the Raj, may very well have learned how to cook indigenous dishes from their indigenous cooks.

Ada’s cookbook is complicit in writing them out of their essential place in Burgherdom, so now it’s time that ‘respect must be paid’. To do this I turn now to four sources; Elisabeth Locher-Scholten’s account of totok women (a Dutch citizen born in Holland and living in Indonesia) and their servants in Java between 1900-1942; MacMillan’s work on women in the Raj; Allen’s collection ‘Plain Tales from the Raj’; and my parents, aunts and uncles, and Anne-Marie Kellar, a Dutch Burgher still living in Sri Lanka, all of whose recollections have been of immense value in writing this paper.

I acknowledge that the positions of these three communities of women were not socially or culturally equivalent. Ada was not a woman of the Raj who, In MacMilllan’s words, ‘in her miniature empire…had many of the same problems as the men on their larger stage. How was she to rule her subjects? How was she to keep India under control?’ Nor was she a totok or a Eurasian (I am using Locher-Scholten’s term here) woman in Indonesia in the early years of the 20th century. Totok women were part of the emergence of a fully-developed colonialism in Indonesia in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, and so engaged, says Locher-Scholten, in forwarding the ‘Ethical Policy, the Dutch variant of the British ‘white man’s burden’. Eurasian women perhaps had more in common with Burghers, being those descendants of intermarriage between Dutch settlers and Indonesians, but Locher-Scholten’s study does not deal with them and so I have no material for comparison.

However, the three communities were contemporaneous over a number of years and do show very similar basic patterns of relationships between the householder and the servants. The differences, I suggest, are due to the fact that the Burgher women of Ada’s and my mother’s generation were not involved in a colonial project, or at least not directly. That was the province of the British woman householder. If Burgher women had been involved in some kind of aculturation process during the years of Dutch settlement in Sri Lanka, by the time of Ada’s generation they had had 200 years over which to drop the project as their subalternship became clear, or were denied a further place in the project, hybrid and hence perhaps not trustworthy of the project.

This is pure speculation on my part and needs further exploration outside of the scope of this paper. Here I can only note that there were indeed differences in the relationships between householders and servants across the three communities. The discussion that follows considers all the servants of these households – ayahs, houseboys, batmen, sweepers, launderers cooks and other, but focuses on the cooks.

Who were these cooks? In the Javanese households Locher-Scholten describes, the cooks were all women. Allen’s interviewees mostly speak of men cooks. Blunt says The only female servant likely to be employed within a British [Raj]household was an ayah, who acted as a maid for her British mistress and often cared for young children. In my families’ households cooks were as likely to men as women; Rosalind and Appuhamy are the two cooks I remember; my uncle Anton at different times had a Tamil woman, and a Singhalese man, Nonis; Anne-Marie Kellar remembers her grandmother’s cook Jane (a Singhalese woman) and also a Tamil man.

Locher-Scholten and Allen give no information on the age of cooks on entering service. In my families, their ages were quite varied. Rosalind was in her mid-thirties when she became my ayah. Nonis was 16-17 years old when he began working for Anton, and the ayah Anton employed to look after his first child was 60, a Tamil woman who came looking for work she could not find in her village. Anne-Marie Kellar describes cooks in her families’ households as being ‘very young’. Sometimes they could be very young indeed.

‘All of the servants I had came looking for work or were brought by parents wanting to know if we required ‘home help’. I recall one man, he had a little girl (about 9-10 years old). He was told by a family up the street that we had a new baby and could possibly use the girl. The girl was neatly dressed and was carrying a bundle of clothes. We employed her to look after Carinne. I think she was offered three meals a day and Rs 15 a month. Premawathie (the girl) slept on a mat in the children’s room. It was usual to protect young female servants from prowling males!’ Anton van Reyk

Our Burgher household cooks were either Singhalese or Tamil, and occasionally a Moor. They came into Colombo looking for work from villages either at the borders of the city or in remoter rural areas. My family doesn’t recall any of the servants making regular visits back to whatever their families were in their home villages. At the most, they may have returned there for short stays during the Buddhist New Year. Premawathie returned to her village when she was ‘grown up. That seemed to be the usual trend of events especially if they were very young girls. She went back to her village and we never saw her again’. Patsy Alvis suggests this was common practice; ‘Women usually left in their mid twenties to marry having worked for ten years or so & accumulated a small sum of money. And then if the marriage didn’t work out they went back to the relative security of a roof, meals & a monthly wage.’

More often, they stayed in service most of their lives. They moved between households when circumstances changed for the Burgher family. When we left Sri Lanka, Rosalind was employed by my uncle for a short time. When Anton migrated, Nonis went to Anton’s brother, and Gunadasa, his brother, to Anton’s his sister-in-law. They moved between generations of the one family. ‘My grandmother’s cook, Jane, came to work for us when my Dad got married to my Mum. She was already trained by Nanna, and knew exactly what Daddy liked to eat!! Nanna made sure of that!’ They may have left service if their circumstances changed. ‘One of our ayahs had a daughter who worked with her for us – when the d. was old enough. The daughter was quite good looking & learnt English while with us. She left to be a nannie with some well-to-do- family & married a Singhalese gentleman’.

This last is one of the few recollections of any of the servants’ families other than those who may have been servants in the same household. My mother does not recall any family for Rosalind or Appuhamy. The Tamil ayah Anton hired did have a husband and children, but Anton never saw them. None of the servants in the Kellar household were married. Similarly, of the women servants in Java and Madura in 1930, 72 percent were unmarried.

Recruitment of servants varied. They may have come door-knocking independently, or been brought as Premawathie was. More often, though, they were recommended by someone else in the family, were handed down through the family, recommended by other Burghers, or very occasionally by the other servants. My Aunt Marie said ‘They were the answer to a Housewife’s Prayer. When a young lady was to be married, her mother and mother-in-law looked out for a cook woman for her. Some were recommended by family and friends. None of my family recalls anything like the Batavian Bedienden-kantoren (offices for servants) or The Association for Housewives in the Indies (Vereeniging voor Huisvrouven in Indië) which ‘provided its members with bediendenpassen (evaluations, or letters of recommendations, which employers completed after one year of service); it published advertisements and organized contact addresses’. Nor do they mention any ‘local Club (which) kept a registry of reliable, or at least no especially unreliable, servants’. But in Java, too ‘Recruitment of servants took place mainly by word of mouth, either on the recommendation of other trustworthy servants or though the intercession of European friends’.

Whatever the recruitment process there was a fairly standard interview conducted by the Burgher householder.

‘The cook was selected after an interview during which they had to give an account of what they could cook, especially for the dinner menu and they would rattle of a litany of all their accomplishments, eg. beef steak, stew, pot roast, roll cutlets (or rissoles as they are commonly known here), chops etc.’
Odille Balthazaar

‘A cook who could “prepare a nice rice table and serve a reasonable European dish” was considered “of inestimable value and incalculable dignity.’
Locher Scholten

They don’t appear to have had to show they could do this, and there was usually no written recommendation asked for or offered. As with the women of the Raj, perhaps for the Burgher householder ‘Testimonials, purportedly written by former employers, should always be treated with suspicion; they had probably been bought in the bazaar or borrowed from another servants’. The capacity to turn out the inevitable trio of dishes was not always entirely appreciated. ‘I remember my mother throwing her hands up in exasperation when once interviewing a cook who, when asked what “issaraha kaama” ( European food) she knew, replied “Istew, Bistake, Cutlis”!! Mother exclaimed “that is all they know to make”.’ The cooks, along with the other servants, had free accommodation and meals, may have had their bedding provided (camp cots or mats usually) and had their medical expenses met. Some received gifts of clothing on birthdays or Christmas. They were paid varying amounts. When Nonis started work for Anton at 16 years old, he was paid R40 a month. My mother thinks she paid Rosalind R30 a month. Both of them said this really just ‘spending money’ as most of their material needs were met. Anne Marie Kellar recalled:

‘Salaries of course varied with the times, but were usually not very much. These people were so very poor and had next to nothing in their villages, so it was a huge privilege to work in our homes and live comfortable lives. They were paid monthly, and were given holidays usually for the Sinhala New Year, when they went home having spent a lot of their earnings on new coloured cotton fabrics for the women’s’ “cloths” and jackets and also on men’s sarongs. They would return from their villages with a box full of Sinhala sweetmeats!’

Where did they learn their cooking? The Sinhala and Tamil dishes they generally brought with them from their homes. Cooking the istu, istek, cutliss and other European dishes were learned either from the Burgher householder or from other cooks in Burgher households. Most of the servants were not literate in English, though many were literate in their own language. Rosalind would write up the daily accounts of her spending in Sinhala and read them in Sinhala to my mother. In the room she shared with Appuhamy there were always Sinhala newspapers and magazines. Nonis was taught to read and write in English by Anton, but that appears to have been rare. ‘The cooks did not use any ‘Cookbooks’. It was just a matter of taste, smell and experimenting.’ Locher-Shcolten writes ‘The kokki has no professional education; she was trained on the spot and was valued for her skills. In the 1930s, the Association for Housewives organized cooking courses on ‘the European menu’ for indigenous kokki, another indication of the ‘totokisation’ and ‘professionalisation’ processes of colonial modernity.’ Ada certainly was not writing her cookery book for the instruction of the cook.

Most women spoke with their cooks in Sinhala, or English if the cook was Tamil. This was the habit in Raj households as well. ‘It was a point of honour with us in the established civil services never to talk to the servants in anything but their own language,’ states John Cotton. Some servants while not being fluent in oral or written English did understand. ‘They never spoke English, and considered it very rude to do so, but for sure they understood the language very, very well! Our old cook from the plantations, Arumugam, spoke English in a quaint way’.

But in the Raj there were also those who viewed English-speaking servants as ‘untrustworthy’. Indeed, the memsahibs of the Raj generally kept a much tighter reign on their servants than did Ada and her generation, or indeed the women of my mother’s generation. (remind them of ther role Raj women saw themselves having to play)

‘…one’s attitude was that they were menials…everybody shouted at the servants. They were the most frustrating people. They always had some very good reasons for why something wasn’t done, which you knew – and they knew you knew – to be an absolute lie.’

The relationship between the householder and servant when it came to cooking reflects this view of them as menial, not always to be trusted. The recollections of the memsahibs of the Raj are full of the control they exercised over their servants.

‘It was not customary for the memsahib to intrude into the bobajee-khana. Instead, cook appeared armed with his account book every morning, to be followed by other members of staff in strict order of seniority. ‘This magnificent figure,’ recalls Mary Wood, ‘would come in and we would gravely do the accounts for the day before. We had so many plates of soup at one anna, we had had chicken for four, fish for four and so much fruit – and I would pay for that. We’d then decide what we would eat that day…He would then produce a pile of plates and on these plates he would say he wanted flour, sultanas, this, that or the other.’
C Allen

‘The other field of battle was the kitchen. Here she waged a constant struggle to make sure that the servants kept it clean and that the cook produced British meals and did not cheat her too much. A good housekeeper inspected the pots and pans daily…’’
MacMillan

Locher-Schloten notes a similar practice among the totok women. My mother and aunts recall a similar ritual, but one that was much less controlled. The Burgher householder would meet with the cook and go through the menu for the day, the dinner meal in particular. She would then give the cook an amount of money with which to buy the ingredients. But she did not then dole out the quantities of ‘flour, sultanas, this, that or the other’; the cooks were trusted to take what was needed and tell the householder when supplies were running low. They were required, however, to give an accounting for how the daily petty cash was spent, either in the evening or at the beginning of the next day. It was generally the cook or other servant who would do the food shopping on a daily basis from nearby markets. This separation of householder and servant in the Raj through the control over provisioning was embedded by other practices. Servants slept in separate quarters; the kitchen itself was often not within the house; they ate food they cooked only for themselves; and their contact with children of the household, particularly adolescents, was strictly controlled. Locher-Schloten describes a similar ‘cordon sanitaire’ in the totok household.

‘Children should not be allowed to eat the food servants gave them, instead mothers should feed the children themselves…Children should also be forbidden to have conversation with the Indonesian servants, as this would hamper their language abilities and five them the wrong Dutch accent… Teenagers should be kept away form the servant quarters, because there they might learn about sexuality, which was considered improper…
Locher-Scholten

Relationships in the Burgher households of my family and that of Anne Marie Kellar were much more relaxed. Servants often had separate quarters, but they were likely to be a room in the house near the kitchen. Men sometimes slept just inside the front door as a security measure. Ayahs often slept on the floor of the room of the children’s room. Many are recalled as sleeping in the kitchen. Rosalind was allowed independently to discipline us, both verbally and with a good smack across the face or body when needed. They ate separately, but they ate the food they prepared for us. In Anne Marie Kellar’s childhood household ‘the children in the family were closest to the servants, and next the lady of the household, but last of al the master. He would have little or nothing to do with the servants except maybe the driver.’ I recall spending many hours sitting in the room Rosalind and Appuhamy shared, playing cards, or Singhala childrens’ games or pouring over their Sinhala magazines.

This more cooperative relationship in managing the household extended to cooking the meals. Practice varied from family, but it was generally true that the cooks would take the entire responsibility for breakfasts and lunches, while dinner – the nominally European style meal – would be either prepared by the Burgher householder or by the cook under her supervision, and the Burgher householder would reserve cooking specialties for herself, with the Christmas Cake and the Breudher being the most sacrosanct in this regard.

‘Of course! the revered Christmas Cake and Breudher were never made by anyone else! My maternal grandma did much more cooking than my paternal nanna. Granny had her specials. Jewel like marzipans which were laid out to “bake” in the sun, and looked too good to eat! Then she made her famous trotter stew– heavenly! Then there were her Turkish Delight, Marshmallows, Chocolate Fudge, etc’.
Anne Marie Kellar

‘Talking about recipes your paternal grandmother did a pol kiri badun to die for & her duck salmi was out of this world’.
Patsy Alvis

‘She used to teach the women in the kitchen. It was a question really of them learning to cook by looking. So she didn’t have to prepare it all the time. She would occasionally cook European meals for the night; stews and roasts and things like that’.
Celia van Reyk

‘Our mother always cut up the meat for curry – especially as the Sir Lankan meat bought daily (fresh) from the market butchers was full of nervous tissue – tendons, gristle, sinews etc. Occasionally the cook woman was requested to take the meat back to the butcher in exchange for a better portion! It was a delight to watch our mother perform this chore – with a very sharp knife. The meat was unrecognizable after she had finished. Perfect. (The cooks) had a flair for cooking and knew the basics because it was what they ate in their own homes. They boiled rice to perfection & could make sambols, mallungs, curries – vegetable, fish, meat etc (dry fish! – yum). What they didn’t know to cook was the ‘issara kame’ – first course – which we had at night – with bread – but they soon learned. Auntie Nita had a woman who made an excellent chicken pie – having to make the pastry – decorated with pastry flowers and leaves & tasty! They were also familiar with our breakfast menus – hoppers, string hoppers, pittu, roti, kiribath – because they cooked these in their home.
Marie van Reyk

Let me not make it appear that all Burghers were so relaxed or amiable with their servants. Anton notes ‘Some servants were illiterate, and treated more like slaves’. Patsy Alvis was equally forthright ‘Did you really believe in a democratic society in SL that treated servants in any other way than vassals! That is extreme I know but to this day that is how a servant is considered in some homes out of the towns & cities. In Burgher homes they were generally treated reasonably well & ate what was cooked for the family but I know of families who had a pot of inferior rice for the servants & the dogs!’ Locher-Scholten observes a similar pattern among the totok households; ‘European housewives did not do the cooking themselves. At most, they occasionally made something special (kokkkerellen) such as a cake or a special Dutch dessert for their husbands.’ But where the relationships were strong and supportive, when it came to partings, both sides experienced a sense of loss.

‘Nonis and Gunadasa were very sad to see us leave and we were very sorry to have to say goodbye to them. We did not feel bad leaving them as we made sure they went to homes where they would be well looked after. They were so reliable and good that everyone was clamouring for them.’
Anton van Reyk

Rosalind’s story has an unhappy ending. When my granny died, Rosalind had a nervous breakdown, so strong was her love for granny. My brothers and I returned home one Saturday to be greeted at the front door by Rosalind stabbing at us with a knife and hysterically screaming. She went back to her village for three months to rest and recover. My brother Chris says that she had a ‘devil dance’ done over her, a practice we were familiar with from times when this exorcism ritual had been done on people in the tenements behind our house. She returned to us and worked for us until we migrated at the end of 1962. One of my last memories of that day is of Rosalind throwing herself at my mother’s feet crying distressingly and asking to be taken with us. Even had we wanted to do that, it would have been impossible under the White Australia Policy which existed at the time. Mum can’t remember what happened to Rosalind after this. My maiden aunts and my paternal grandmother moved into our house and brought their own servants with them. Mum thinks Rosalind went and worked for my Uncle across the street for a while. Chris says he recalls that she moved through two or three positions and then returned to her village. I have a picture of my granny and I have her cookery book. I have nothing of Rosalind until now.

Copyright (C) 2006 Paul van Reyk

References Brohier, D Back to my Grandmother’s kitchen
The Ceylankan Number 24 (Vol VI. No 4) November 2003
Trin T. M.When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation Gender and Cultural Politics. New York: Routledge 1991
Bhaba, H. K. The Location of Culture New York; Routledge 2004
Gandhi, L. Postcolonial Theory. A critical introduction. Allen & Unwind: Sydney 1988
Joustra, K. To be, or not to be a Burgher: That is the question The Ceylankan Number 24 (Vol VI. No 4) November 2003
Ferdinands, R Proud & Prejudiced. The story of the Burghers of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: R Ferdinands 1995
Theophano, J. Eat my words. Reading women’s lives through the cookbooks they wrote. Palgrave: New York 2002
Deutrom, H. (Ed) Ceylon Daily News Cookery Book. London:The Association of Newspapers of Ceylon Limited. First Edition 1929.
Cook, I., Crang, P., and Thorpe. M. Regions to be cheerful. Culinary authenticity and its geographies in Cook, I., Crouch, D., Naylor, S., and Ryan, J.R. (Eds) Cultural turns/Geographical turns: Perspectives on cultural geography. Prentice Hall: Essex 2000
Alles, D. Facets of Sri Lanka 2. Traditional foods and cookery down the ages Colombo Doreen Alles 1997z,br> Collingham, L. Curry: A biography London: Chatto & Windus 2005
Locher-Scholten, E. Women and the Colonial State. Essays on Gender and Modernity in the Netherlands Indies 1900-1942 Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. 2000
Pomeranz, K. and Topik, S. The world that trade created. Society, culture and the world economy 1400 to the present. Armonk: A.E.Sharpe 1999
MacMillan, M. Women of the Raj London: Thames and Hudson 1988
Allen, C. Plain Tales from the Raj London: Abacus 2004

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Neil Perry[i]

Introduction:

I have never seen Neil Perry on a Friday night at Faheem’s Fast Food in the Inner-West Sydney suburb of Newtown. That is where I head a couple of times a month after an early movie, just in time for the mid-evening sitting crush of mostly Muslim families, couples and singles, and a fair smattering of local Anglos, hoeing in to plates of haleem, nihari, chicken and chick peas, brain masala, katakat, biriyani, and yes, tandoori, naan, butter chicken and mango chicken.[ii]

There is no mood lighting, no incense, no sitar music, no Rajasthani mirror-work doodads, no travel agent shots of the Taj Mahal or camels, or women with nose-rings. There is a tv high up in one corner that sometimes shows Bollywood movies and Star TV Hindi soaps but it isn’t really being watched by anyone and it isn’t loud enough for ambience. There are some disdainfully obvious sprays of garish plastic flowers falling out of non-descript wall sconces. The lighting is white-bright, bouncing whiter off white tiles that cover the floor, walls and chrome cafeteria furniture. You can watch the cooks make tandoori bread and meats behind the front counter, but they aren’t doing anything flash; just getting on with the humdrum of sticking marinated stuff on skewers and then putting same into the blackened hole of the tandoor. Anyway, you can’t stand there too long; you get in the way of people placing take-away orders, paying the bill or hunting down the order that has gone a tad astray.

There is a fridge from which you can grab a coke or other carbonated soft drink, or help yourself to a mango lassi or a pre-made paan in its green or red-striped triangular silver-foil package. The crockery is basic white; mass produced for easy replacement. The naan comes in a shallow plastic sieve which inevitably means you get crisp charred crumbs all over the unclothed table-top. It is an all male service staff so no saris, just casual clothes that are often the worse for wear, and one or two in a jacket and pants outfit that looks like any fast food outlet uniform. It isn’t licensed and there is no BYO; it is a strict Muslim establishment and all alcohol is forbidden. All meat is strictly halal and promoted as such on the restaurant signage. There is a tap and a small sink for you to wash your hands, an encouragement to use your fingers to eat.

And any night of the week it serves some of the best South Asian food I have eaten in Australia or South Asia; and I have had plenty, including from great little small restaurants in Chennai.[iii]

You won’t find Faheem’s in the 2005 Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide (GFG).[iv] You won’t find it in the Restaurant listings in the Sydney Yellow PagesÒ[v] You will find it in the 2002 SBS Eating Guide (SBSGuide) and Sydney Eats (formerly Cheap Eats).[vi] You won’t find Zahid Ali, self-taught chef and owner of Faheem’s, fronting a lifestyle program on free-to-air or pay television.

Faheem’s Pakistani/Punjabi table, like other South Asian restaurants, is a site of contestation through which South Asian cuisine in Australia is constantly consciously and unconsciously being constructed. It is at once a site of flow in a transnational space of the Pakistani diaspora (a subset of both the wider South Asian and the Muslim disaporas), an ethnosite within which ‘Indian’ ethnicity is constructed in Australia, and a gastrosite in which ‘Indian’ food is constructed in Australia.

Food as counternarrative

When I began some years ago to review and write about South Asian food in Australia, it was for selfish reasons. I was frustrated with the limited variety of what’s generally on offer as South Asian cuisine in Australia. I’m a Sri Lankan Burgher, and South Asian cuisine is my cuisine preference. I wanted the chance to eat from its vast table, not in order to confirm an identity, but because it tastes so damn good! I wanted my friends and colleagues to have that opportunity also, outside of my cooking.

But as I began to write this chapter, another reason emerged to make as much claim on my effort. Lakha and Stevenson observe that ‘varying discourses in India and Australia strive to forge the idea of a unified Indian culture and community which cannot be sustained in the face of diversity and contradiction…[and this is] associated with the discourse of multiculturalism in Australia which adopts an essentialist view of culture and equates ethnicity with culture…[which is] unable to account for the complex and diverse ways in which identities are forged’.[vii] The intent of the search for essentialism is not always benign, however. Lakha and Stevenson point to the deployment of essentialist views in current militant Hindu nationalism in India. Closer to home, Turner, reviewing incidents between 2001 – 2003 where ‘Muslims of one kind or another were described in ways that denied them membership to the Australia community’, argues that ‘Australia is now a community overwhelmingly defined by the necessity of exclusion, and increasingly marked by the revival of nostalgic, even sentimental, refutation of the pluralism that informed the ethics of multiculturalism’.[viii]  He goes on to say ‘The process to which Muslim-Australians are now subject are not typical of the processes required to manage assimilation, accommodation, or inclusion; they are those required to manage exclusion.’[ix]

As a South Asian I share these concerns. Turner suggests that the way to resist these tendencies is to ‘to produce new forms of cultural history out of this situation…to find new stories and counter-narratives to present to the public.’[x]

Can food provide new stories and counter-narratives of the kind Turner thinks necessary?

‘Tell me what you eat: I will tell you what you are’, said Brillat-Savarin, and studies of food and foodways since have explored the ways in which food and identity construct each other, both at the individual and the social level.[xi] Food is ‘a prime constituent of human relations (and) conveys social meanings.’[xii] Food is ‘mobile, multivocal, and polysemic; it moves from one group to another, it expresses different voices, and it can take on different meanings depending on the intention of the consumer’. [xiii]  I would add here that the different meanings also depend on the intention of the producer.

Ethnocised food is a contested category in this regard. I use the term ‘ethnocised’ and not ‘ethnic’ here deliberately. I take ethnicity to be socially constructed, dependant ‘on a set of consistent actions that permits others to place an individual in an ethnic category.’[xiv] The construction of ethnicity is only possible when there is some other cultural /social / national group against which it can be defined; a South Asian is not an ‘ethnic’ in South Asia. However, ‘groups in control are never ethnicities; they use ethnic distinctions to organize social and spatial marginalities, and to legitimize a sort of negative integration of minority groups’.[xv]

On the one hand, commentators on ethnicity and multiculturalism caution against a too easy acceptance of the positive role of consuming ethnocised food arguing that as with other cultural exchanges, perceived reciprocity, the ‘ethnic’ sharing food and the host culture accepting both the food and the presence of the ‘ethnic’, is not an equal exchange.[xvi] Moreover, ‘The choice of a restaurant and of dining companions is a way of making a claim about the social order, or accepting it or contesting it.’[xvii] On the other hand Narayan has argued against such pessimistic views of the exchange, suggesting that ‘a more carnal relish may sometimes contribute to appreciation (of the other, the ethnic) in ways as powerful as intellectual “understanding” ’.[xviii]

I am sympathetic to both views and the view that ethnicity is fluid and negotiated between the ethnocised group and the mainstream culture. However, I am more hesitant than enthusiastic where the ‘carnal relish’ is embedded in a problematic narrative. I suggest below that one of the enduring narratives that construct South Asian food in Australia has been British colonialism as it was practiced in South Asia. As such, I see what I am embarking on in this study as a very preliminary investigation of the extent to which South Asian food as constructed in Australia produces counternarratives to this. More powerfully, I want to explore to what extent it achieves what Kwasi Wiredu terms ‘conceptual decolonization’ a divesting of ‘modes of conceptualization from the colonial past that cannot stand the test of due reflection’.[xix]

Authenticity: A word of caution

As much as ethnicity, I take authenticity to be ‘a locally constructed folk idea’ whose ‘objects that are said to represent authentic experience may become sites of contention… [it] is mutable and contingent’. [xx] Hence in what follows I don’t make any pleas for authenticity in South Asian cuisine. I do, however, consider how authenticity is mobilized in the construction of ethnocised cuisine by both the ethnocised and the host culture.

Transnational spaces and ethnosites

Ethnicity needs spaces in which both the ‘alien’ and the ‘host’ cultures engage in the practices out of which it is constructed. I take the position that ethnicity is constructed within the conjuncture of the transnational space of the migrant community and the geographic and social spaces of a host country. Voigt-Graf has developed a terminology for a geography of transnationalism that I work with here. Transnational spaces are the sum of the nodes and flows between cultural hearth, new centre and diasporic nodes. A cultural hearth is the country, region, or place of origin of migrants and their descendants. A new centre is a country where migrants and their descendents have lived sufficiently long to regard it as their home. A node is a country, region or place that is linked by flows, where the latter includes people, products, money, ideas, cultural goods and information. A diasporic node is a country, region or place where migrants have settled long enough and in sufficiently large numbers to have created a permanent presence as a community. Transnational space is the sum of the nodes of a migrant diaspora and the flows between them. It is shaped by social activities and in turn shapes them. Transnational spaces are comprised of sub-spaces defined by transnational activities, of which the two significant for the present discussion are economic and cultural spaces.[xxi]

Within both economic and cultural spaces are specific sites at which the migrant community and the host community interact. Following Turgeon and Pastinelli, I use the term “ethnosite” for these, sites which ‘evoke[s] the relations multicultural societies maintain with their immigrants….[xxii] There are a number of ethnosites through which to explore the construction of South Asian food – cookbooks, lifestyle magazines and television programs, the home kitchen among them. The focus of my exploration is those at which ethnosites and gastrosites most directly intersect – ethnocised restaurants and restaurant guidebooks.

Gastrosite: A neologism under construction

The ethnosites I work with are also sites through which Australian mainstream culture constructs what ever is encompassed as Australian cuisine. For my purposes, I am going to call them gastrosites, an ungainly and uneuphonious word but chosen for its resonance with ethnosites.

Australia as a diasporic node in South Asian transnational spaces[xxiii]

It is necessary for my later discussion to give here and overview of South Asian migration to Australia. Literature on food unsurprisingly links immigration of a community from one country to another as a major, if not the major factor, in the development of distribution points for food (ingredients and meals) of that community in the host country.[xxiv]

I have presented the pattern in Table 1. with notes on the geopolitical events in Australia and South India that defined the pattern.

Table 1. South Asian migration to Australia

In the 2001 Australian census two questions were used to identify peoples cultural/national identity; one asked for birthplace, the second asked for declared ancestry in an attempt to capture a broader definition of identity. The second therefore includes some people not born in South Asia but who nonetheless in some way identify as South Asian. Interestingly, having this category allowed a number of people to respond on the basis of their regional identity within India. On the basis of ancestry, then, the numbers of people from South Asia in Sydney was as follows: 66,100 Indian; 16904 Singhalese; 680 Pakistanis; 6230 Bengalis (mostly Bangladeshis); 3427 Tamils; 1918 Anglo-Indians; 1814 Nepalese; 767 Punjabis; 326 Sikhs; 67 Pathans; 31 Malayalis; 7 Marathis; and a further 2045 who only identified as South Asian.[xxv]

Turgeon and Pastinelli, while finding that the numbers of ethnocised restaurants in Quebec had grown substantially between 1951-1971 did not find that the growth was linked to specific patterns of immigration, but had increased at a faster rate than other restaurants.[xxvi] They did not, however, consider whether the range of food produced in the ethnocised restaurants had changed over time, a question which is important when considering the construction of an essentialist South Asian cuisine given the wide range of regional cuisines on which to draw. I undertook a sidetrack preliminary study of the pattern of immigration from South Asia from to Australia from 1800 – 2005 and recipes for South Asian food in small selection of cookbooks printed in Australia over that time. The findings, are persuasive that as the range of South Asian regions from which the migration population was drawn spread as outlined above, there was a shift from a principally Raj-oriented construction to a more pluralistic one. I discuss this further below.

Ethnocised restaurants: the economics of the exotic

‘In fact, food and nation are so commingled in popular discourses that it is often difficult not to think one through the other.’[xxvii]

The majority of ethnocised restaurants – their geography, menu, style of service, selection of staff, décor – are constructed by two primary forces; the economic realities for their owners, and the complex factors governing their selection by consumers, with the latter comprising both those from the ethnocised community and those from the host and its other ethnocised communities where they exist.

Literature that considers the production and sale of ethnocised food from the perspective of the owner/entrepreneur consistently shows that for the migrant, the decision to enter the sector is an economic one and not one based on conceiving of food as a way to facilitate understanding and appreciation of their culture by the host community. Owners are ‘ “cultural entrepreneurs” who use their ethnicity as a “vital part of their stock in trade”…the scarcity of the experience contributes to its marketability’.[xxviii] They may do it ‘for the simple reason that society asks for “authentic” cuisine prepared by authentic ethnic people, and, at the same time, society provides immigrants with the opportunity to start small businesses, to attain a certain level of autonomy, and to become part of the culture of work’.[xxix] For many, food production is a result of ‘blocked access to desirable alternatives resulting from discrimination.’[xxx] None of the six owners interviewed by Turgeon and Pastinelli were restaurateurs in the home countries.[xxxi]  Lu and Fine found that most of the owners of Chinese restaurants they studied had college degrees of professional experience before entering the business.[xxxii]

Ethnocised food is marketable and profitable. De Vita points to the ‘substantial margins’ to be made in the grocery market from the sale of ethnocised foods.[xxxiii]  Food Engineering described the expansion of the ethnocised restaurant market in the United Kingdom from ‘small eateries in ethnic enclaves to ‘popular restaurants and even chains of restaurants.’[xxxiv]

However, there are problems. The sector is highly competitive and marked by high turnover.[xxxv] Many ethnocised enterprises in Australia as small businesses which cannot depend on an ‘enclave economy’; the migrant community they arise from does not have sufficient members to provide a long-term viable market based on their consumption alone.[xxxvi]

Turning to the other part of this problematic dyad, the literature offers a range of views as to why the non-ethnocised in Western cultures such as Australia choose to eat in ethnocised restaurants. A common theme sees the consumer engaged in idealized, vicarious, adventure travel, a form of ‘a form of internal tourism’, with elements of ‘authenticity’ and ‘exoticism’.[xxxvii] Participants in some studies report a multicultural agenda of ‘cultural blending’, ‘cultural enrichment’, ‘otherness’ or ‘true foreignness’.[xxxviii] There is also for some an overtly political agenda of showing that they are ‘cosmopolitan and tolerant’. [xxxix]

Monteiro looked at the factors influencing decisions of patrons choosing to dine specifically at ‘Indian’ restaurants. [xl] Important factors for the entire sample were quality of food, taste of the food, and hygiene and cleanliness, in descending order of importance, while availability of vegetarian choices, availability of new items, and cultural familiarity were the least important. Quality of food and taste of the food were the only two significant factors on which respondents of other ethnic origin had higher expectations than those of South Asian origin. Those of South Asian origin had higher expectations on hygiene and cleanliness, cleanliness of restrooms, employee friendliness, value for money, efficient service, spicy food, atmosphere, price, vegetarian choices, availability of new items, and cultural familiarity.

On a reading at this level the findings appear to be at odds with the other studies reviewed here. However, looking more closely at the responses given to the open questions in the study, the common themes do emerge. On the basis of word count here, the factors participants identified were atmosphere and music (26%), flavour (17%), vegetarian possibilities (17%), taste (16%), spicy/hot (11%),  and cultural experience (11%).[xli]

But the desire for ‘true foreignness’ or ‘internal tourism’ is not open-ended; the experience must be ‘simultaneously exotic and familiar: distinguishable from mainstream cuisine (and thus desirable) yet able to be assimilated as edible creations’; they want ‘food suitable to their taste…..they rejected foods that were defined as ‘unpleasant’ and well outside their experience [my emphasis]. [xlii]

Owners of restaurants marketed as ‘ethnic’ have to engage in a number of strategies in order to attract and keep their market share. Here, Lu and Fine identified naming practices, locational segmentation (more ‘exotic’ Chinese restaurants in ‘Chinatowns’ and areas of cultural and artistic capital, more ‘Americanised’ restaurants in suburbs and working-class neighbourhoods), the use of familiar ingredients (‘American’ vegetables in contrast to ‘authentic Chinese vegetables’), and meal formats, and service time (with ‘Americanised outlets prioritising speed).[xliii] Saker and Brooke identified segmentation into and ‘upmarket’ sector (targeting non-ethnic clientele and using selective above and below-the-line promotion) and a ‘local’ market where owners competed on price and quality with others in the area.[xliv]

Restaurant guides: Gastroroaming or gastrostreaming?

Restaurant guides have been a part of Western food culture since at least 1803, the first publication of Grimod de la Reynière’s Almanach des Gourmands.[xlv] Mennell argues that guides, while generally being seen as written by an elite for an elite have had a ‘democratising function’ in shaping taste, disseminating the standards of the elite more widely.[xlvi]

Chossat and Germaud go further, pointing to evidence of a ‘strong and significant statistical link’ between the prices a restaurant charges and the rating it gets in the most influential guides.[xlvii] Their study of descriptions in French guides found direct relationships between higher ratings and whether the comments noted diversification over specialization; good technical skills of the chef; praise for flavour combinations, simplicity, delicacy; sophistication in preparation; whether the food is ‘personified’ by the chef named; and that the chef or restaurant is seen to be part of gourmet cuisine history.[xlviii]

I consider these in relation to the descriptions of the restaurants that are listed in the GFG and the SBSGuide again with the intention of exploring how these criteria further construct South Asian food.

Chicken tikka boom boom

I turn now considering how the strategies employed by South Asian restaurants in Sydney construct narratives of South Asian food. The investigation is based on (61) menus of South Asian restaurants in Sydney. I have also looked at a small amount of additional material from other regions in NSW and from capital cities in two other States (2 from Hobart, Tasmania, and 4 from Adelaide, South Australia). For the Sydney restaurants my search strategy was to collect menus of all restaurants listed in the 2005 GFG and the SBSGuide as representing the opposite ends of the continuum of guides in which South Asian restaurants could be listed. This was further supplemented by collecting additional menus from restaurants in the same local areas as those in the primary base.

I not only wanted to read the broad narratives from these menus, but also to see whether differences in national identification, market segmentation, and nomination by the GFG generated different narratives.

Of the 74 restaurants 62 identified themselves as Indian, 3 as Pakistani & Indian, 6 as Indian & Sri Lankan, 2 as only Sri Lankan, 1 as Nepalese.

Using a combination of categories suggested by de Vita’s work, I allocated restaurants to six market segments – residential enclave (18 – from Inner Western and Western suburbs in Sydney with high numbers of South Asian residents); business enclave (12 – all from one suburb that is the focus of the financial and information technology sector in Sydney); ethnocised restaurant enclave (5 restaurants within 300 metres of each other in an Inner City suburb where the local residents were mainly young urban professionals not of South Asian ancestry); local (45 – restaurants which depend on local residential and business trade, this includes the 12 business enclave restaurants) ; gourmet (5  – these are restaurants that position themselves and are positioned by food reviewers in Sydney as ‘fine dining’). The six restaurants outside Sydney are classified as local.

Twenty one South Asian restaurants are listed in the GFG, all under the single heading of ‘Indian’. Nineteen of these were in the study sample. Forty eight South Asian restaurants are listed in the SBSGuide; 36 listed as Indian (21 of these are in the study sample); 7 listed as Sri Lankan (5 in the study); 2 listed as Pakistani (both in the study); 3 listed as Nepalese (1 in the study). Seven restaurants listed in the GFG are not listed in the SBSGuide.

Naming strategies

Lu and Fine suggest that naming practices are ‘designed to …generate an exotic hyperreality’.[xlix] This is true of the restaurants here. Few simply declare themselves as ‘Indian’, or ‘Sri Lankan’ in their main title. Instead, they use place/region names (Bombay Heritage, Oh! Calcutta, Ajmer, Malabar, Nilgiris), ingredients (with two further exoticising by using non-standard spelling – Qmin (cumin), Zaaffran (saffron), personal names that would suggest ‘easternness’ to a non-South Asian consumer (Adil’s, Akhi’s, Abi’s, Manjit’s, Surjit’s), South Asian icons (Taj, Maharajah’s Palace, Blue Elephant), recognizably South Asian style of cooking (Tandoori Palace, Dakhni) and words which may hold no resonances for non-South Asian consumers but promise a generalized exotic (Hotel Saravana Bhavan, Maya da dhabar). This observation is true across all the market segments identified.

What is interesting, though, are the silences in the main and sub-titles; what they don’t point to. All three restaurants that are owned by Pakistanis and target themselves below the line to that community say they are Pakistani and Indian. Partition and the on-going tension between the two countries symbolically have no place in this new mutually transnational space, Australia, where the media and politicians constantly urge migrants to leave their civil/communal conflicts to their home countries. Sub-titling also divides India and its cuisine neatly into North and South; there is no place for more refined regionalism. The sub-titling is useful, however, in alerting non-South Asian consumers to an India below the Raj and cultural highspot line (Mumbai through Delhi and Agra to Calcutta). Most would easily read northerness from main titles – Calcutta, Bombay, Ajmer – they would find it harder to place Nilgiri, Malabar or Comorin as Southern regions.

So, from names alone, the overall narrative is exotic, but allows for a widening of the understanding of the diversity of the exotic, albeit this is limited.

Meal format

Only five restaurants break entirely with the Westernised practice of dividing the menu into entrée/appetizers/starters, mains and desserts; none of those in the GFG do so. Dividing the menu this way is a significant shift from the way food was and is still eaten in South Asia. In general, South Asian food divides up into something more like snacks (samosas, pakoras, chaat, behl puri), substantial meals (rice/’bread’ and curries, dosai either plain with sambhar or stuffed with a vegetable masala, baryonic) and sweets, but there is no expectation that a full meal ought to include all three elements in the Westernised sequence. That practice evolved jointly under the growth in France of the modern restaurant and the adoption of service a la ruses, the form of service in which each diner is given an individual serving with the elements of each particular course.[l]

It is a structure that presents specific challenges to formalizing South Asian food. The challenge arises where the individual ‘dish’ is intended as the complete meal – dosai, biriyani, and thalis being examples here; in the use of chutney’s, pickles and raitas and the like as accompaniments; in the variety of ‘breads’. Restaurants often deal the first of these challenges by quarantining these in to separate areas of the menu with a haphazardness of placement before, during or after the entrees and mains that betrays the confusion about how to incorporate them into the Western structure. The strategy is also used for the accompaniments, though here it is easier to settle them into the menu format by placing them usually at the end.

‘Breads’ present a further challenge because of their variety. Menus in non-South Asian restaurants do not ordinarily list various kinds of breads. For South Asian food it is inescapable. There is no generic word for ‘bread’ in any South Asian language, despite the conflation of the word ‘naan’ with the idea of ‘bread’ I suggest in many non-South Asian diners food framing. Rice also presents a challenge first with biriyani, where meat or vegetables are cooked in with the rice, and then in the varieties of other flavourings used individually – coconut, saffron, lime, tamarind. Sri Lankan food and that from Tamil Nadu makes for further problems with forms of starch foods that are virtually classes in themselves – pittu/pootoo (fresh grated coconut and rice flour steamed in a tube), stringhoppers (rice flour made into a vermicelli like mat), idli (steamed cakes of fermented rice and urud dhal eaten with sambhar, a thick spiced vegetable ‘soup’ (another problematic category). Most ‘breads’ and rices are quarantined under their Westernised categories and generally corralled along with the accompaniments at the end of the menu and before desert, which at least signifies that they are savoury (though Kashmiri naan transgresses here by being stuffed with sultanas).

Those that break entirely from the form are rare, however, and are either in the residential enclave segment, or target themselves below the line to a particular community.

So, the narrative from meal formats is one of small revolutions within the hegemony of the three-course meal. Consumers must at times eat differently, constructing the idea of a meal differently, if they are to eat diversely.

Ingredients

If the desire for ethnocised food is a desire for difference in taste as is suggested by Monteiro’s subjects, to what extent do South Asian restaurants provide for this in the ingredients they use?

(a) Vegetables and fruit

Lu and Fine found their restaurants limiting their choice of vegetables to ‘ “American vegetables” – carrots, snow peas, green peppers, broccoli, and mushrooms’.[li] The South Asian restaurants in the present study work with a wider range, though the majority of the vegetable still fall squarely within the bounds of what’s acceptable in most Western cuisine – potatoes, peas, cauliflower, mushrooms, spinach, beans, pumpkin, tomatoes. The common Eastern-identified vegetables are lentils (but most often only as a dahl), chick peas, and eggplant/aubergines, the last two of which I suggest have been ‘Australianised’ not through South Asian but Middle Eastern cuisines.

Beyond this, two opposing trends are evident. The first is a small movement for inclusion of more ‘alien’ fare. In restaurants in residential enclaves and some of those in the GFG okra/ladies fingers is in the process of becoming ‘Australianised’. But in both cases it is the only one of a possible range of more ‘alien’ vegetables that. Still excluded are bittergourd/kerala, snake beans, gourds, melons, and leaf vegetables other than spinach (water spinach/kankun, for example). The other trend evident in restaurants in the GFG is for introducing ‘gourmet’ vegetables – oyster mushrooms, asparagus and celeriac being examples.

Fruit and sugar as ingredients are much less in evidence than would have been the case until the late 1960’s if the parallel evidence from cookbooks of the periods of the pre-multicultural Australia. Recipes in these cookbooks, with very rare exceptions, are for generic ‘curries’ using prepared powders and, more rarely, pastes, turned into a sweet and sour concoction with the inclusion of apples, sultanas and sugar, on the one hand, and a squeeze of lemon or a little tamarind on the other.[lii] Dried fruit remains on most menus in Kashmiri/Peshawari naan (to which I want to return later), and vegetarian koftas, which appear on menus across all markets, as does mango chicken (of which I also have more to say later). At the same time, the use of unripened fruit – green bananas and pineapples – is rare, though they are both present in Southern Indian and Sri Lankan food in situ.

(b) Spices

There is little variation in the range of spices used, with some justification. Cardamom, chilli, cinnamon, coriander, cumin, fennel seed, fenugreek seed, garlic, ginger, pepper, and turmeric are the most commonly used spices in situ also.

(c) Meats

All but one restaurant offer the same basic range of meat; the exception being the only purely vegetarian restaurant in the sample. Chicken, beef, mutton and lamb are standard. Pork is absent from restaurants on Indian/Pakistani dishes except in the one restaurant that specialises in Goan food, which is not unexpected given that the majority of owners are Hindu or Muslim with the one having a prescription generally against eating meat and the other a prescription against pork. This may explain why while most of these menus offer vindaloo, invariably ascribing its origins to Goa, they don’t offer pork vindaloo though this is the origin of the style. Pork does feature in Sri Lankan enclave restaurants, which has a similar Portuguese influence in its food.

Restaurants in the gourmet market are also likely to offer a greater variety of poultry – quail, spatchcock, duck, part of a trend within the gourmet market generally, and so a deliberate positioning strategy.

More recently goat meat has begun making its way onto menus in a limited way and most often in enclave restaurants or local restaurants marketing below the line. It would be interesting to know whether non-South Asians order it. Offal appears only on Faheem’s menu (brain masala and katta kat – a dish of finely chopped liver, kidneys, heart), though liver and tripe are popular Sri Lankan curries in situ.

Overall, the story from meat parallels that of vegetables where most of what is on offer comes from animals that are central to Western meat dishes and would appear regularly in non-Asian domestic meals.

(d) Seafood

The range here is most often limited to fish or prawns, with rare excursions to calamari and octopus. Crab only appears as a standard on Sri Lankan or South Indian residential enclave menus. Again, it’s persuasive that what is on offer is what is seen as consumer-friendly, though I would have expected calamari to have been more present given that it has been thoroughly Australianised through its popularity at barbecues.

(e) The narrative from ingredients

The narrative here is generally one of a domesticated exoticism with some wildness in enclaves and at the gourmet end, generated by a differences in the balance between the economics of the ethnocised food market and the criteria of gourmet dining. At the enclave level, the owner can afford to be ‘truer’ to the community palate because they can count on enough business to maintain their profit margins; they may even be able to trade on this to attract customers from community members outside the enclave as does Janani, a Sri Lankan enclave restaurant which gets a significant trade from Sri Lankans in other distant suburbs.[liii] At the local market level, owners must attract a majority non-community consumer population, and so engage in the kinds of practices identified by Lu and Fine – working with ‘Australianised’ vegetables and only gradually introducing new products.[liv] At the gourmet market level, owners respond to the underlying valorisation of novelty, sophistication and culinary history/authenticity.

Preparations/dishes

This pattern continues in the individual dishes on the menus. The majority – those in the local market, business enclave, and ethnocised restaurant enclave – share as much as half the menu items, and they are ones that would most spring to mind if non-South Asian consumers were asked to nominate dishes they identify as ‘Indian’  specifically – tandooris, tikkas, kormas, vindaloos, rhogan josh, butter chicken, mango chicken, kofta, aloo mattar (peas and potato), saag/palak paneer (spinach and Indian cottage cheese), dahl, samosas, naans.

Restaurants targeting the gourmet market are much less likely to have these dishes on their menus, and when they do, they name and describe them in ways that position them as ‘gourmet’ versions of the dishes. Zaaffran offers tandoori neha described as king prawns glazed with rose petal, mustard oil, cardamom, coriander, yoghurt and cheese (paneer). Oh Calcutta! Offers tandoori murgh described as grainfed spatchcock seasoned and marinated in yoghurt, herbs and spices. In the former, the rose petal, and in the latter the grainfed spatchcock clearly signal a gourmet intention.

Restaurants in Indian residential enclaves will also have some of these – butter and mango chickens, tandooris, and vindaloos – but they will usually take up less than a quarter of the menu items. Interestingly, restaurants in Sri Lankan residential enclaves often will also have tandooris, naan and butter chicken. Clearly these dishes are here to offer an alternative for non-Sri Lankan consumers unfamiliar with the cuisine, and even perhaps to attract them to the restaurant for purely economic reasons. The three Pakistani/Indian restaurants also offer these and mango chicken. While tandoori and naan are a staple of Pakistani cuisine, however, butter and mango chicken are not.

In fact, butter and mango chickens are prime examples of dishes invented by South Asians solely for the non-South Asian customer. They do not exist in the cuisine in situ; there is no listing for either in either of Achaya’s definitive volumes on Indian food, nor in any of the over 30 South Asian recipe books developed for the regional market that I have collected on travels in the region.[lv] Here, and in the use of cream in savoury dishes like koftas (for which there is also no historical reference in Achaya nor contemporary references in regional cookbooks), and in the multiplicity of fillings and embeddings in naan that move it towards an Indian ‘pizza’ cheese (including  parmesan in one restaurant), garlic, vegetables – I argue can be seen the continuation of the construction of South Asian food within the narrative of the British Raj. That construction was characterised by a gradual sweetening and regulating of the spicing of the range of preparations to which the members of the Raj sat down at table.[lvi] It was also in this narrative that curry powders and pastes were invented, supplanting the practice of hand-grinding spices as needed.[lvii]

Proportion of vegetables to meats

It is also the narrative which I suggest leads at least in part to the imbalance between meat and vegetable dishes on the majority of menus across all the market segments. ‘The British in Calcutta’, says Burton, ‘ate huge amounts of every sort of meat, even pork and beef, both roast and curried’.[lviii] In all but a handful, the proportion of vegetable dishes to meat dishes (counting both entrees and mains) was never more than 50:50 (gourmet and residential enclave markets), with some as high as 30:70 (local and business enclave).

This is doubly curious. Firstly, most Indian restaurants are Hindu owned. While not all Hindus, following religious proscription, are strict vegetarians, there is proportionally more vegetable in most Hindu diets, and certainly in most cookbooks produced within India.[lix] Secondly, surveys of the food industry show an increase in the consumption of vegetarian dishes in restaurants in recent years.[lx] Only two restaurants were strictly vegetarian, of which only one, Woodlands, markets itself as such.

Descriptions of dishes

It is to the Raj we also owe the word ‘curry’, where the Tamil word kari meaning quite a specific spiced sauce eaten with rice has been generalised to the whole class of South Asian food, and by extension to Thai, Malaysian, Indonesian, and Burmese preparations.[lxi] It is not until the late 1960s and early 1970s that cookbooks begin to use a wider range of terms with kofta and vindaloo as early breakaways.[lxii] In the most recent compendium of Indian cooking published in Australia, the range of terms for ‘curries’ has expanded considerably, with only four entries indexed under the generic term.[lxiii]

This broadening is paralleled across all market segments in the description of dishes, where a variety of vernacular names are now used for both particular dishes and for styles of cooking, for example, navrattan, pasanda, kharai, dhansak, avial, poriyal, dhum. The practice continues in the willingness to use vernacular words for the main ingredients, for example jingha (prawns), saag/palak (spinach), brinjal (eggplant), rava (semolina), dahi (curd), bakra (goat). The practice is haphazard, with few settling on one style, and these being as likely to be in the residential enclave as the gourmet markets.

At the same time, the descriptions of dishes become more expansive and begin to borrow the terminology from Western menus and restaurant guides. For example – channa batura is ‘leavened huge plain flour bread. Puffed, served with chick peas curry cooked in delicately spiced medium sauce’; lamb sagwala is ‘diced lamb delicately cooked in a medium curry sauce with puree of spinach’; goat curry is ‘melt in your mouth cubes of goat on the bone in rich tamarind curry sauce’.[lxiv]

The language here is poised between conceptual decolonization through the use of the vernacular, and a re-colonisation through the use of Western taste criteria.

Regionality

Haphazardness also characterizes the extent to which menus reflect the range of regional cuisines in South Asia.

Sri Lankan restaurants fare best in this across all market segments in which they appear – residential enclave, business enclave, and local (significantly, there are no Sri Lankan restaurants yet within the gourmet market though one new restaurant in that market, Flying Fish, which in keeping with the current Sydney gourmet valorisation of the ModOz fusion style is trading to some degree on modern interpretations of a small number of Sri Lankan chef. Overall, it is true to say that Sri Lankan cuisine is not notably regionalized, though there are some dishes that are identified with the Jaffna Tamil or the Burgher communities.

Pakistani cuisine, on the other hand, is absorbed within the overall Northern Indian domination of South Asian food that is characteristic of the majority of the local and business enclave markets in the study. There are differences that become evident in the three Pakistani/Indian restaurants, particularly in dishes that are influenced by Muslim dietary practices, but outside of Faheem’s, the number of distinctive dishes is small.  Under this cyclopean gaze, Goanese food is stripped down to a generic fish or prawn curry and bastardised versions of vindaloo, except in Viva Goa, the only restaurant that acknowledges the marriage of Portuguese and indigenous Goanese ingredients and cooking styles; the rest of the Malabar is reduced to a generic prawn curry most often; and Tamil Nadu is Madras curry or nothing.

I argue that this is doubly a continuation of the Raj narrative. Firstly in that until the growth in migration of indigenous South Asians to Australia, the non-South Asian Australian consumer’s understanding of South Asian food was inevitably shaped by Australia’s position first as a series of colonies of Britain and then as an Anglo member of the British Commonwealth, as is evidenced by cookbooks during the years till the late 1960s. Secondly, the greater migrations of South Asians to Australia until recently has been from Northern Indian states that were within the Raj, and migrants wanting to enter into the South Asian ethnocised food market shaped their menus both to satisfy the taste and ingredients expectations both of their own communities’ and non-South Asian Australians.

That change is underway is clear from the number of local market restaurants putting dosai and idli on their menus, the foods most easily characterisable as Southern Indian, and the growth in all markets of restaurants either specialising or prioritising Southern Indian food. There is a clear link here, I suggest, between this and the newer migration from this region.

Conclusion: Narratives and counternarratives

‘The importance of colonialism must also be noted, since much of what happens in the world today – including our knowledge about it, and the ways we use that knowledge in consumption practices – bears the mark of colonial activities and legacies.[lxv]

‘White Australia, while always a nation of immigrants, underwent a major demographic transition in the second half of the twentieth century … What had been a predominantly British settler population whose cultural nationalism was solidly based on British folkways (especially language and food) was transformed.’[lxvi]

The construction of South Asian food in Australia is from the evidence of menus and cookbooks an evolving one, as it must be. No cuisine is static. As the production, preparation and distribution of food involves economic and social transactions, so the construction of a cuisine will be subject to forces of change and forces against change. The construction of an ethnocised food market is subject to forces constructing ethnicity, the economics of small business, and those constructing tastes.

This study shows that at this time in Australia, there continues to be an uneasy and somewhat haphazard conceptual decolonisation that is developing alongside of Australia’s disengagement with its history as a British colony formed in the years of British imperialism in South Asia, the broadening of the source communities of South Asian migrants and their creation of complex transnational spaces, and the on-going dialogue of multiculturalism. There are emerging counternarratives of the kind that may mitigate the ‘refutation of pluralism’ and the ‘management of exclusion’ for which Turner is concerned.

[i] Neil Perry, The Australian Way, QANTAS , May 2005, .

[ii] Throughout I will not use the convention of italicizing or placing in quotation marks the names of dishes and ingredients that may be unfamiliar to the general reader. As will become clear, this is in order for me to enact in the context of ethnicised food the process I describe later as ‘conceptual decolonisation’.

[iii] In keeping with developing practice, I use the term South Asia to mean the countries of Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

[iv] Matthew Evans and Simon Thomsen (eds), The Sydney Morning Herald Good Food Guide, Penguin, Melbourne, 2005.

[v] Yellow Pages Sydney 2004 Telstra Corporation.

[vi] Maeve O’Meara and Joanna Savill (eds), The SBS Eating Guide to Sydney, Allen & Unwin, Sydney 2004. SBS is the Special Broadcasting Service, the free-to-air television service in Australia with a Federally legislated charter to program multicultural and multilingual content. I have been a reviewer and associate editor of the sections in the Guide on Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan food in the past three editions; Kerry Boyne and John Newton (eds), Sydney Eats 2005 Universal Magazines, Sydney. I was a contributing reviewer to this edition on a range of cuisines including South Asian.

[vii] Salim Lakha and Michael Stevenson, ‘Indian identity in multicultural Melbourne. Some preliminary observations’. Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol 22, no 3, 2001, p 252.

[viii] Graeme Turner, ‘After Hybridity: Muslim-Australians and the imagined community’, Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, vol 17, no 4, 2003,  p 413.

[ix] Turner, ibid., p 414.

[x] Turner, ibid., p 417.

[xi] Jean-Anteleme Brillat-Savarin, The Physiology of Taste, Penguin, London, 1970 p 13.

[xii] M. Douglas and J. Gross, ‘Food and culture: Measuring the intricacy of food systems’, Social Science Information, no 20, 1981, pp 1-35.

[xiii] Laurier Turgeon and Madeleine Pastinelli, ‘“Eat the World”: Postcolonial Encounters in Quebec City’s Ethnic Restaurants’, Journal of American Folklore, vol 115, no 456, 2002, p250.

[xiv] Shun Lu and Gary Alan Fine, The presentation of ethnic authenticity: Chinese food as a social accomplishment, The Sociological Quarterly, vol 36, no. 3, 1995, p 535.

[xv] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op. cit., p 252.

[xvi] See for example S. Gunew, ‘Against multiculturalism: rhetorical images’ in G.L.Clark, D. Forbes & R. Francis (eds) Multiculturalism, difference and postmodernism, Longman Cheshire, Melbourne, p 41; Pierre van den Berghe, ‘Ethnic cuisine: culture in nature’, Racial Studies, no 7, 1984, p 395.

[xvii] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit., p 251.

[xviii] Uma Narayan,  Dislocating Identities: identities, traditions and third-world feminism, Routledge, New York and London, 1997, p 184.

[xix] Davie E Cooper, ‘I am because we are’, Times Literary Supplement, April 29, 2005, p 6

[xx] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p 538.

[xxi] Carmen Voigt-Graf, ‘Towards a geography of transnational spaces: Indian transnational communities in Australia’, Global Networks, vol 4, no 1, 2004, p 29.

[xxii] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit., p 251.

[xxiii] I draw on four sources here: James Jupp, The Australian People. An encyclopedia of the nation, its people, and their origins, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 2001; Rakesh K Agrawal and Meena Chavan, ‘Entrepreneurship development amongst the ethnic community in Australia’ , Paper presented to the United States Association for Small Business and Entrepreneurship June 1997 National Conference Proceedings, 1997; Voigt-Graf, op. cit.; Lakha and Stevenson, op.cit.

[xxiv] See for example Prema Monteiro, ‘Factors that influence the decision of patrons to dine at selected Indian restaurants in the Twin Cities’, A research paper submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Science Degree, The Graduate College, University of Wisconsin-Stout, 2002, pp 19-20; Franco de Vita, ‘The ethnic food business: an overview on the growth of the ethnic food market’, Local Economy Quarterly, vol 3, issues 1 & 2, p 91.

[xxv] Classification Count Data 2001 Census, Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004.

[xxvi] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit., p 254.

[xxvii] David Bell and Gill Valentine, Consuming Geographies, Routledge, London, 1997, p 168

[xxviii] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p 536.

[xxix] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit., p 256.

[xxx] Agrawal and Chavan, op.cit.

[xxxi] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit.. p 256.

[xxxii] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p 537.

[xxxiii] De Vita, F. (1994) The ethnic food business: An overview on the growth of the ethnic food market. Local Economy Quarterly vol 3 issues 1 & 2 p 98.

[xxxiv] De Vita, op.cit., p 98.

[xxxv] De Vita, op.cit., p 94.

[xxxvi] Agrawal and Chavan, op.cit.

[xxxvii] van den Berghe, op.cit., p 394; Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit. p 259; Monteiro, op.cit., p 17.

[xxxviii] Turgeon and Pastinelli, op.cit. p 259; Lu and Fine, op. cit., p 540.

[xxxix] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p.539.

[xl] Monteiro, op.cit., pp 71 – 85.

[xli] Monteiro,  op. cit., p.87.

[xlii] Lu and Fine, op. cit., p 540.

[xliii] Lu and Fine, op. cit., pp 539 – 542.

[xliv] De Vita, op.cit., p 94.

[xlv] Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1996, p 266.

[xlvi] Ibid.

[xlvii] Véronique Chossat and Olivier Gergaud, Expert opinion and gastronomy: The recipe for success Journal of Cultural Economics, 27, 2003, p 127.

[xlviii] Chossat and Gergaud, op.cit., pp 135-136.

[xlix] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p 539.

[l] Eva Barlösisu, ‘France’, The History and Culture of Food and Drink in Europe V.C.3, The Cambridge World History of Food, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2000, pp 1212 – 1213; Stephen Mennell, All Manners of Food, University of Illinois Press, Chicago, 1996, p 150

[li] Lu and Fine, op.cit., p 541

[lii] See for example Mrs, Foster Rutledge (Compiler), The Goulburn Cookery Book, 1899, Facsimile edition National Trust of Australia,1975, pp 38 & 51; Jessie Sawyer (Compiler), The Coronation Cookery Book, Country Women’s Association of New South Wales, Publicity Press, Sydney, 1938 p 91; Bee Nilson, The Penguin Cookery Book, Penguin, Melbourne, 1952, p 163,

[liii] Interview conducted by the author with the owner for other purposes than the present study.

[liv] Interviews conducted by the author with owners of five other South Asian restaurants for other purposes than the present study.

[lv] K.T. Achaya, Indian Food. A Historical Companion, Oxford University Press, 1994; K.T.Achaya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Oxford University Press, 1998.

[lvi] David Burton, The Raj at Table. A culinary history of the British in India, Faber & Faber, London, 1993, pp 1- 12.

[lvii] Burton, op.cit. pp 73 -75.

[lviii] Burton, op.cit. p 6.

[lix] See for example, Karuna, Delicious recipes from Andhra, Jaico Publishing, Hyderabad, 1993, in which there are 40 vegetable preparations and only 9 meat or egg; Smt Radha Puri, Gujrati Dishes, Shani Publications, Delhi, 1996, in which there are over 70 vegetable and only half a dozen meat.

[lx] Monteiro, op.cit, p 22.

[lxi] Alan Davidson, The Oxford Companion to Food, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, p 235.

[lxii] See for example Doris Adey, Curries from the Sultan’s Kitchen, Reed, Sydney, 1968 pp 36 – 38 and 31 – 33 (all significant for some of the earliest recipes to move away from recommending generic curry powders and to list ingredients for grinding instead); Ellen Sinclair (ed), The Australian Women’s Weekly Cookbook, Golden Press, Sydney, 1970, p 56-58 (though the kofta here is made with curry powder and tinned pineapple).

[lxiii] Priya Wickramasinghe and Carol Selva Rajah The Food of India. A journey for food lovers, Murdoch Books, Sydney, 2005, pp 292-295.

[lxiv] Woodlands Family Restaurant, May, 2005; Joy of Chennai, May, 2005; Blue Elephant, May 2005.

[lxv] Bell and Valentine, op.cit., p191

[lxvi] Susan Sheridan, ‘Eating the other: food and cultural difference in the Australian Women’s Weekly in the 1960s’, Journal of Intercultural Studies, vol 21, no 3, 2000, p 321

The post Friday Night at Faheems appeared first on Buth Kuddeh.

How familiar does this sound – butter chicken, sickeningly sweeter than caramel sauce made from a slow heated can of condensed milk; garlic naan leathery as roohide; aloo mattar with frozen peas and dry potatoes in a gravy oily and brown as the waters of the Yarra under Princess Bridge; and onion pakoras that could as easily pass for cow pats and are generally as combustible. Go to any Indian take away/restaurants in any suburb of any city in Australia and you’ll find this depressingly uniform regurgitation of someone’s idea of Indian food dished up by platoons of cooks all claiming to be graduates of the Taj Hotel cooking school.
In Newtown, Sydney, there’s an exception to this sub continental revenge on the stomachs of their colonial masters, a small restaurant, regrettably named the Tandoori Hut. Order from the menu here and you’ll end up with the usual bain marie coagulated pap, albeit done with more care. But wave away the menu and ask for the night’s specials and you are somewhere entirely different. You will find nihari, paya, haleem, Pakistani dishes that would convince even the Americans that lamb is a superior meat to beef (or even that goat – bakra – is superior to lamb); and a fresh mint and green chilli (chatni) uncompromised by the usual lashings of yoghurt.. You will have crossed the line from curry-in-a-hurry to cuisine. That’s what draws the regular contingent of Pakistani, Indian and Sri Lankan taxi drivers, their friends and relatives here every night. That and the $10 standard fee he charges them for what he sees as home food that he hesitates to offer to his Anglo-Australian clientele.
I think it’s interesting and damning that Raphael, the Pakistani Christian owner/chef, calls his restaurant the Tandoori Hut. Sure, tandoori is a part of Pakistani cuisine, at least at the Punjabi end. But I wondered why he hadn’t seen value in differentiating what he offers from what’s available everywhere else. When I asked him, he said, he felt he had to offer his Anglo-Australian customers what they expect from an Indian restaurant – kormas, vindaloos and tandoori everything – if he was to make a go of his business. I’ve had the same comments made to me by other chefs from the sub-continent, who would love to introduce a wider variety of regional dishes if they could see it as good for business. Where did Raphael learn that the way to an Anglo-Australian’s wallet was through the slush of brown dhal of a consistency and flavour of monsoonal mud? Why can I only get crunchy, pungent, Thai fried fish with a dipping sauce of thick blachan, tamarind and force-10 chillies as a takeaway from Pontip’s hole-in-the-wall grocery at the fag end of Pitt St, Sydney? Why is burek, that marvellous Macedonian coil of spinach, cheese or meat-filled flaky pastry produced virtually only to order from the hygienically challenging eponymous Newtown Pastry Hot Burek Shop?
I think the answer lies in a kind of White Australia Policy practiced in Australian cuisine, the regulation of the ingredients of an Australian palate to the innocuous sultana that may sweeten our increasingly indigestible colonial damper, but will sit firmly on any robust, uncontrollable Magic Pudding that threatens to run along the road to a truly multicultural future.
If as Brillat Savarin says ‘the destiny of nations depends on how they eat’ how do we eat, that is construct, the cuisines of our immigrant and indigenous peoples and what does that say for our hopes in a future Australian multicultural republic.

Whose multiculturalism?
Multiculturalism as a construct is acknowledged, if not centralised, in the proposed preamble to the Australian Constitution, but what is meant by it is not explicit. How do we as a society construct multiculturalism? I would hazard that the majority Australian view of multiculturalism is something like this:
“We have developed an Australian way of doing things. We have been able to retain the good bits that have been contributed to Australian society by the various cultural tributaries and reject the bad bits”.
These are in fact the words of the Prime Minister, John Howard, as quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald 6th May 1999. This statement was seen at the time as a significant turnaround for Howard, but it is not. It only recasts in the guise of tolerance and inclusiveness, the view echoed in debates around immigration and Aboriginal land rights. These debates are redolent with ideas of the good and the bad migrant and Aboriginal. Good Serbs/Bosnians/Kurds are those who don’t bring their national conflicts to our shores. Bad Serbs/Bosnians/Kurds burn NATO flags outside US embassies. Good Chinese become heart surgeons. Bad Chinese belong to triads. Good Vietnamese don’t come here on leaky fishing boats that sneak up on our coastline at night. Good Aboriginals refuse to take government handouts.
Who, in all of this, are the ‘we’ that ‘develops the Australian way’? On what basis have they chosen the ‘good bits’ and the ‘bad bits’? Howard’s is not a multicultural voice but a culturally specific voice – the voice of the colonial ancestors of the majority of white Australia. It is not my voice, nor that of my Malayala ancestors and my Australian-born children, nor the voice of the generations of other non-white immigrants and their Australian-born children.
It is this voice, however, that regulates how the ‘various cultural tributaries’ of our indigenous and immigrant past and present can contribute to the making of an Australian society. In doing so, it also determines the nature of that society.

Advance Australia Fare
The Macquarie Dictionary defines culture as ‘the sum total of ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which is transmitted from one generation to another’. What a society eats and the rules around the preparation and consumption of food are part of a society’s ways of living and so fall within this definition of culture. How have we shaped food within the Australian culture?
Max Lake, writing in Food on the Plate. Wine in the Glass makes this statement:
‘Sixty years ago….food was fresh but plain, wine avoided as too ‘strong’, or ‘foreign’. On the rare night out, one encountered limited menus at a few pseudo-French restaurants, in Australia run mainly by Italians. Ethnic Chinese, Italian and Greek ‘greasy spoons’ were a big deal. The average Australian home had little cultural tradition to influence flavour preferences or cooking styles. With hindsight this may have been a virtue in that we had nothing much to unlearn’.
I want to take issue on this view of our culinary advance in Australia. I don’t think the Australian home has as yet developed the ‘cultural tradition’ Lake sees as a necessary precondition for the development of an Australian cuisine. I think the reason for this is in the position Lake appears to take in the second part of the quote above. He seems to see Australian cuisine as a tabula rasa until some unspecified but clearly recent time, positing that Australia was in the happy position of having nothing to unlearn in the development of a truly Australian cuisine. I don’t agree. I think that it is precisely that we have so much to unlearn that holds us back.
The flavour preference and cooking styles of the Australian home remain by and large those of Empire. When it adopts non Anglo-Celtic cuisines, it does so within the framework of that colonial history, employing on cuisines the full range of colonising practices that have been employed in appropriating or demonising the dress, art, music etc. its conquered peoples.
Some cuisines are dumbed down in the process. When I first came to Australia 37 years ago, the only curry powder on the shelves was a yellow dust that was little more than powdered turmeric and bore the brand name of the man mostly singly responsible for the establishment of the British Empire in India, Robert Clive. The first curries I had not of my father’s making were served up to me by a well-meaning friend, bright yellow and lumpy with sultanas and apples. The recipe, she said, was from her Scottish mother. And little has changed over the years. The Taree West Cookbook of 1997 has a recipe for curried chicken built on a base of a packet of Continental Dutch Curry soup. I recently travelled in South Eastern Queensland and Central Australia and I’m not sure that it’s an advance in Lake’s terms to find there laksas consisting of a watery broth in which carrots, celery and capsicum swam unfettered by either coconut milk or lime.
Alan Saunders, writing in The Australian Magazine, July 3-4, 1999 describes the phenomenon thus:
“… whole cuisines get turned over and stripped of their valuables, like unsuspecting foreign tourists who’ve wandered into the wrong part of town…..The result is that, say, tempura, that fascinating Japanese take on deep frying, is no longer a special treat to be enjoyed in the specific cultural context of a Japanese meal. Then again, perhaps it is; I encounter the word ‘tempura’ on menus far more frequently that I encounter genuine tempura on my plate.”
Others are exoticised. For them is reserved the allure of danger, sexual risk, primeval power. Read any article promoting chillies in recent Australian magazines and you will inevitably be told that chillies fire the sexual appetite. Frankly, I can think of few things less sexy than putting my tongue down the throat of someone who’s just downed a force-10 Jalapeno. Terry Durack recently in the Sydney Morning Herald ascribed a ‘dense jungle-undergrowth sort of flavour’ to the pineapple curry served at Sailors’ Thai. I don’t know whether to be pleased or surprised that Durack is in the habit of tasting undergrowth. The last time I had a bite of jungle undergrowth, it wasn’t by choice. I was face down on the ground after tripping over a massive root while stumbling down a track in the Dorrigo rainforest, and it tasted exactly like munching on dank, rotting wood. Here’s Mietta O’Donnell talking about the Melbourne restaurant Bortolotto in the Weekend Australian Review – May 15-16. ‘Bortolotto’s had a distinct style that suited its position very well – it embodied a lot of what St Kilda was.’ Okay, O’Donnell may have meant something quite innocent, but to someone who has only the mythology of St Kilda within which to contextualise the statement, how could it be understood? Perhaps that it embodied some stereotyping of European Jewishness, loud, brash, emotionally charged. If cuisines were migrants these foods and flavours would stand in the position against which we could flagellate ourselves as we measured our conspicuous staidness, our ordinariness.
And then there are cuisines or aspects of cuisines which we reject outright. Mary Douglas in her groundbreaking study Purity and Danger, links dietary laws and food preparation practices to the practices communities develop to defend themselves from moral pollution by other communities pollution that has the capacity to destroy communities. To ingest food which is identified with the polluting agent is to risk ingesting the pollution. At least some part of an abhorrence of halal meat is a projection into its preparation of a rejection of the perceived pollution of our Christian morality by the morality of Islam, a morality we have demonised for a good thousand years or so. The barrier to full engagement with bush foods is in part a lingering identification of them as primitive, uncultivated, or fit only for survival when there is no other food at hand. To eat them is to allow the possibility of reversion to tribalism. These are the cuisine equivalents of the illegal migrants from the mythic North, landing in their leaky boats on our undefended shores, melting into the rainforests to begin their erosion of our economy and the bulwarks of our cultural mores.
On the other hand, we sometimes actively seek out foods from cultures to which we can ascribe an Arcadian wholesomeness. Eat the peasant food of Tuscany and we ingest honesty, simplicity, rustic health, and a ‘natural’ sexual response. That may be true, I suppose, as long as we have access to the high quality of medical care and the wide pharmacopeia that your average peasant doesn’t, and don’t spend our life in bone-wearying manual labour. And from my experience no amount of olives and garlic have made Latin’s any less lousy as lovers.
Either way, the endpoint is the positioning of food and its preparation as a tool of racism. Lake’s ‘greasy spoons’ are not just nostalgia but a part of the overt operation of racism at a particular time in our history. A joke from my school days – how did all those Italians know how to get to Australia?; easy, the first one came over with a map and the others just followed his oil slick over the water. But let’s not congratulate ourselves on the abolition of this form of racism. It’s not an accident that the term ‘sticky rice’ is used as a pejorative term in Australia for people of Asian origin whose sexual and affectual preferences are for others of Asian origin. The ascribed primitiveness of the source, the gathering and the preparation of bush foods conflates into a continuing ascription of primitiveness to all Aboriginal people.

Armchair cuisine tourism
I want now to look at a recent example of the processes I am concerned about. The May 1999 issue of Vogue Living carried a promotion for the day trips Carol Selva Rajah conducts in Cabramatta. The aim of these day trips is laudable , that of introducing people to Asian foods and method of food preparation through visiting the markets and restaurants in Cabramatta. But I want to show how the language in the promotion exoticises the experience in ways that can enhance prejudices about the subjects of the trip, the Asian population of Cabramatta, and their foods, and continues to keep Asian immigrants outside of a definition of Australian citizens.
Here’s the introductory paragraph:
‘Walking through Cabramatta’s shopping centre, deep in the western suburbs of Sydney, you’d swear you were in the backstreets of some Asian town. Little old ladies in conical straw hats cluster around wooden bench seats, fussing over their bunches of home-grown herbs and exotic vegetables (lemon grass, pumpkin flowers, sawtooth herb, snake beans and the like). They sell these to passers-by for next to nothing.’
Here you have all the elements for exoticising and distancing the everyday lives of a growing population of Australians, South East Asian migrants and their, by now, second and third generation of children. The description of the location – ‘deep in the western suburbs’ – already conjures up possibility of danger. Sydney’s west, home to the bulk of its population, is a no-go zone for much of the rest of Sydney, having been demonised consistently in the press as the centre of the illegal drug trade, rife with street gangs and junkies, where street shootings are an everyday event. So already we are being invited ‘deep’ into somewhere alien and threatening. We are being prepared to experience the people who live there as different from other Australians.
Then comes the comparison of the streets of a perfectly average Sydney suburb, with its pavements, its malls, its Reditellers, to ‘the backstreets of some Asian town’. Again, the notion of ‘backstreets’ builds the sense of danger. Backstreets are where crimes occur, where the disreputable hang out. The people on backstreets may not be as innocent as they seem. For Anglo Australians still familiar with propagandist images of Vietnam or with the more recent images of sex tourism and Asian drug cultures, the distancing of the residents of Cabramatta grows stronger.
So, who will we see when we get there – ‘little old ladies in conical straw hats’, another step into stereotyping. We are being invited to disregard to the normalcy of the bulk of those we will in fact see, the young, the families, all in Western dress, with lifestyles and aspirations shared by Anglo-Australians. The point is underscored later in relation to food when ‘the local takeaway of choice’ is identified as ‘a bulging lotus leaf package filled with sticky rice and faintly sweet, braised pork mince’. Never mind that in my experience you are as likely to find chicken as a filling as pork. I do wonder, however, what has become of the Asian resident masses chowing down on their takeaways of choice like hamburgers, chips, battered deep-fried fish and white bread sandwiches. They are somehow removed from any connection to what the day-trip will reveal. They become inauthentic migrants, inauthentic Australian citizens, and we are invited not to see them. Stereotypes are bolstered at the expense of coming to grips with cultures in change.
Then comes the focus on the ‘exotic vegetables (lemon grass, pumpkin flowers, pennywort, sawtooth herb, snake beans and the like)’ and later the fish shops that ‘display unfamiliar (to us) sea creatures such as sea pomfret and milkfish’. Again, let’s leave aside the dubious notion that lemon grass is a vegetable. We do have to ask how long it takes for an ingredient of any kind stop being exotic and start being part of the way we eat. I’d think lemon grass was pretty well ubiquitous and not exotic these days. You can certainly get it at a Woolies/Big Fresh, or plant it yourself after a visit to the herb section of the majority of suburban garden centres. As for pennywort, its exoticism will come as a surprise to Western herbalists and naturopaths. And then there’s poor old pomfret, suddenly now an unfamiliar sea creature rather than the pretty obvious fish it is, and one, I may add, that’s fairly extensively eaten along any coast of the Indian Ocean it inhabits.
The give-away here to what’s going on is the parenthesised ‘to us’. The reader is assumed to be very narrowly conceived Anglo-Australians who has never been inside a South East Asian restaurant and/or visited South East Asia, both I’d argue vanishing like the giant wombats of Gondwana. And of course, the reader can never be someone like me, nor an Australian of second, third or fourth Asian extraction who’ve grown up on snake beans, lemon grass, pomfret and the rest of the exotica on display on our day trip.
I could go on. It will comes as a shock to the proud householders of the early 60’s in Australia that formica tables are part of this Asian experience, as it will shock many the Aussie truckstop proprietor and many an Inner City cafe. Oh, I see, the point here is to link us into our memories of cheap holidays in Asian fleshpots, as is the reference to those little old ladies flogging their home grown greens for ‘next-to-nothing’. Nothing like a good Asian bargain to brag about back home.
Because that’s the main attraction of this, after all, you get to go home again at the end and never have to come into contact with the reality of the lives of the South East Asian communities deep in the West of Sydney.

Fusion Faddism
Let’s turn now to fusion cuisine. There was a time, I suppose, when fusion was an honest attempt to investigate new ways to blend Asian ingredients with standard Oz fare. In these combinations, the purpose was never to assimilate the flavours, but to form flavour contrasts and matches while allowing the individual ingredients their individuality. But the dangers of unthinking fusion are everywhere these days. In Darwin, the Crustaceans at the Wharf restaurant on Stokeshill Wharf flashes its membership of the fusion club like Al Grassby used to wear ties. What are we to make of Thai Green Bouillabaisse that on closer inspection turns out to be no more than a very ordinary green curry. They also offer a Smoked Salmon Tortilla in which the list of ingredients is given as smoked salmon, horseradish cream, capers and gherkins, which leaves one wondering where the tortilla comes in to it and more critically what kind of a mess are they serving up?
In Penrith recently I had the misfortune to sit and watch a friend eat a Tandoori pizza. Now, I was prepared to pretend that tandoori accompanied by crisp naan may just be flexible enough to move to tandoori on a thin crisp pizza crust sans tomato paste. What came was frightening – a wedge of thick pizza base on which a sludge of tomato paste and melted cheese (I doubt it was mozzarella) had been welded to form a sort of pliable gut into which had been inserted shreds of chicken (they may or may not have been tandoori, you couldn’t; tell through the cheese) topped with parsley, olives and capers. In Short Black, Tuesday 17th August, 1999, a Japanese pizza was spied in Randwick. ‘Not only was the topping swamped with enough wasabi to launch a Godzilla sequel’, says our culinary familiar, ‘but the pastry was thick and soft – by our calculations managing to insult two culinary cultures on one plate’. And finally there is this delight from Sydney Markets Ltd. – a ‘Thai style chicken burger’ compromising chicken mince, onion, lime juice, coriander (so far so good), mixed with breadcrumbs and egg (moving blithely West now) to be formed into a 2cm thick patty which is fired and then served on a bed of snow pea sprouts sitting on (wait for it) pitta bread.
A comparison with fusion styles in music is apposite. Here’s the view of David Walker writing in the Newsletter of the Australian Institute of Eastern Music (Vol5. No 4, August 1999):
‘Fusion music is a problem. It often takes the least interesting aspects of the various music forms it employs and mixes them together into something even less than interesting. And that is often the kindest thing you can say about it. Fusion music is often self indulgent, produced by second rate musicians with a superficial understanding of the music they are appropriating. It damages the reputation of the music it borrows from and of the collaborative music movement itself’.
Substitute ‘food’ for ‘music’ in the quote and you have as good a summation of the problem. In a mindless rush to be innovative or faddist cafes and restaurants around the country are having a terrific time insulting the cuisines of the over 140 different nationalities now resident in Australia.

Selling the exotic to the natives
The final expression of this colonisation of cuisines is a form of internalised oppression. Northern Indians in India serve food in major hotels that are kissing cousins to the bain marie abominations of the Indian Diners in AustraliaIn Kovalum, Southern India, I watched mortified the distress of Rajiv, a beachside village café owner faced with two French tourists dumbfounded and on the verge of a major hissy fit that he did not know what a samosa was. The tourists were insistent that it was a well-known Indian snack. Well, perhaps, but Southern India isn’t Northern India, and the Malayalee are not Punjabi. The dosa and the idli oust the samosa at about the line passed which the Moghul’s couldn’t be bothered going. On this occasion, my travelling companion ducked into the kitchen and showed Rajiv what was being asked for. On reflection, I wish she hadn’t.. I hope there is not now a small beachside village café offering samosas.
Back home, I despair of ever finding in my neighbourhood South East Asian restaurants anything like the diversity of leaf greens and tubers that home gardeners bring to market in Cabramatta or Dixon Street.(Tandoori Hut excepted.) In India, again, stay at a guest house or hotel that caters to the Angol trade, and you’ll miss out on the okra. brinjal, snake beans and the like that you will find everywhere in the markets.
David Thompson, from Darley St Thai, has observed a similar situation in the adoption of fusion cooking in Thai hotels. On a recent visit there, Thompson was faced with spaghetti stir-fried with basil, and mango risotto with olive oil, garlic and coconut cream, curry paste, and lemon grass stock. The experience, he said, ‘was like looking at a train crash’ (Short Black, Good Living, Sydney Morning Herald, July 6, 1999). Thompson is very concerned at the prospect of Thai cuisine and traditional teaching methods being lost as a result.

Having the tables turned
In the light of the above, I find the recent reaction to the introduction of beetroot to McDonald’s hamburgers in Australia more than a little amusing. Here, the tables have apparently been turned on us by the neo-colonial United States.
Here’s how one letter writer to the Sydney Morning Herald put it:
‘McDonald’s has finally added beetroot to its burgers in Australia with the McOz, leading the marketing director, Joe Talcott, an American, to state that it would be a ‘very strange and foreign thing’ to find in a burger in the US.
Well, we Aussies have put up with very strange and foreign things in our McDonald burgers for decades – pickles.’
J Archer, St Ives, NSW August 31, 1999
And here’s how another expatriate correspondent put it from the wilds of Ontario, Canada:
‘No, beetroot would never go down in America, because they don’t know what beetroot is. The dreadful dill pickle reigns supreme there, along with raw onions, unbuttered, untoasted buns, no ‘tomayto’ as a rule.
It will be wonderful to get back to Australia and be able to have a real Aussie hamburger, a meat pie, or, especially, our wonderful potato scallops and fish (unobtainable in any country I have visited).
Beverley Paget, August 31, 1999
Most of all I love the positioning of these letters within our continuing uncomfortable relationship with the United States. We resent the loss of our Australian identity under the flooding tide of US culture. It galls us even more because we, a fellow Western society, allies in war, Goddammit , are put in the place of an inferior culture in this process. We recognise the impact of the colonisation of culture when it is enacted on us and resent it, fulminate against it, but cannot see our colonisation of other cultures.
The television commercial for the new McOz caps the whole process off and beautifully demonstrates my thesis in this paper. Each of them features a tourist couple – two New York smart home-boys, a honeymooning Japanese couple, an older working class English couple – eating a McOz. As the scene begins each couple are engaged in a conversation in language that is constructed to embed the visual stereotypes created by the couples clothing and the setting in which they are eating. The two home boys, for example, do a mock gangsta rap on a pier at night with a background of bright city lights.
At some point, one of the pair looks at their burger and asks the other what this red thing is that’s slapped in the middle of their traditional burger. The other one says it’s beetroot, the ingredient that makes the burger a true Australian burger. The questioner takes a bite of the burger and immediately turns to their partner and in broad strine declares the taste terrific.
And there you have it. Eat a true Australian ingredient like beetroot, and you will instantly be an Australian. Someone should tell the government. It’s a cheaper option than all those subversive language classes. I suppose I should be glad. Before I have expounded it, my thesis has entered popular culture. I look forward to thick True Blue Aussie Asian Taste Cafs where my pho comes as a rich carnelian broth in which thick slices of disintegrating beetroot lazily circle.

Bring on the multicultural republic
So where should we be heading? Let’s begin with an alternative definition for multiculturalism than that of John Howard and his ilk. Turning to the Macquarie Dictionary again, we find multiculturalism defined as ‘the theory that it is beneficial to a society to maintain more than one culture within its structure’.
There is nothing here about good bits and bad bits, no tributaries down which little cultural fishies swim to be caught or to pass through the net of an Australian culture. No, this is an inclusive articulation that sees benefit in diversity. And that’s what I want to see for the future development of an Australian cuisine, an embracing of diversity in all its messiness and its contradictions.
David Thompson believes we are capable of such an approach to non Anglo-Australian cuisines, one which maintains the integrity of the cuisine. In a conversation with me occasioned by his observations on the Thai hotel fusion fiasco, he identified four factors that can work in favour of this outcome:
* He believes we have only begun to develop a complex food culture in the last 20 years, so it is still open to alternative approaches to its development. (This is not quite the same position taken by Max Lake in the earlier quotation.)
* Australians travel a great deal. We have tried foods in their home contexts and are eager to have more of the same quality back here. This is a comment made by the owner/chef of Angkor Wat in Darlinghurst. In an interview I conducted with him he said he was noticing an increasing willingness of Anglo-Australians to try ingredients outside of their immediate zone of comfort – though he was not sure that Sydney was ready for cannabis broth.
* Our land mass has enough environmental variation to allow us to grow the raw materials for a wide range of cuisines, so we should not need to substitute or go without. I recently visited Humpty Doo where Asian produce has escaped the market garden and is now grown on 60 and 100 hectare farms and shipped to agents in the major cities. I have a poster produced by the Northern Territory Department of Primary Industries and Fisheries which identifies over 50 different varieties of Asian and equatorial fruits and vegetables being grown there. How long do these herbaceous immigrants have to be here and in what numbers before we think of them as Australian produce?
* Finally, and most tellingly for the substance of this paper, he believes that until recently we have not tried openly to homogenise ethnic cultures. I’d argue with him on this one. I think there was a period in the early 1970’s when we looked poised to embrace some larger societal project, one in line with the notion of multiculturalism being a valuing of difference. So what I see happening at the level of political policy in this country is a turning away from that experiment back to the homogenisation we have practised for most of the period of colonisation of Australia.
I am not arguing for some ahistoric and romanticised notion of the purity of cuisines. I am arguing for an approach to the meeting of cuisines, of individual ingredients, of styles of cooking, unmediated by the baggage of ways of seeing, tasting, smelling that are redolent of values that we ostensibly want to disavow.
If I can step away from the table for a minute, I can describe something of what I mean by way of describing a concert I recently attended. It was sponsored by the Australian Institute of Eastern Music. One half of the program was an extended duet between Ashok Roy, an Indian sarod player, and Sabahattin Akdagcik, playing the Turkish yaili tanbur, both stringed instruments – the sarod fat bellied, multi-stringed, and plucked, the yaili tanbur, like a very long-necked banjo played with a bow. What gladdened me in their musical encounter, apart from the exquisiteness of what they produced, was the process of its production. Here were two musical cultures meeting within the structure of an Indian raga, but with both willing to investigate as equals the possibilities of improvisational collaboration. As they played, the musical form moved easily between an Indian mode and a Turkish mode, exploring melody and rhythm in a successful search for a true fusion where something new was made without a loss to either of its antecedents.
As an example from cuisines, I point to an experience of mine in a different approach to the valuing of the foods of Aboriginal peoples. In August this year I holidayed in Central Australia and I’m heartened by the way bush food is talked about there. Its use is ‘normalised’, placed within the context of a continuing culture which is different to the prevailing Anglo-Australian culture but is equally valued. There is no attempt to exoticise or distance the tourist from the experience of the culture. In the menu of the Kuniya restaurant bush ingredients (pepper grass, bush plums, bush potato) mix with staples (rocket, scallops, pears) with no accompanying text mystifying or romanticising the combinations. In the cultural centre in Kakadu, plants are described using their Aboriginal names, the common English names being mentioned only in passing.
To finish, here’s Gay Bilson in a letter to the Weekend Australian in May 1999.
‘A cuisine is the collective aroma of everyday domestic food. …Until we show ourselves to be more interested in the fair and equitable distribution of the whole, huge idea of what all Australians eat, then our celebration of ‘Australian Food’ will remain a cult for the affluent.’ Amen to that say I. On or about the 18th of August 1999, the Australian population reached 19 million. Of those, 2.5 million do not speak English at home. It will be a great day when that latter 10% find mealy grubs nudging tinned oysters and octopus on supermarket shelves, when crisp fried grasshoppers are served at the bar as a snack during happy hour.

Copyright (C) 2001 Paul van Reyk

The post Conquered Cuisines appeared first on Buth Kuddeh.

Tandoori, tikka, korma, kheema. Tandoori, tikka, korma, kheema. What passes for Sydney Indian food has the weary familiarity of a rickety bullock cart treading the same dusty path year in and year out. It need not be. The Indian sub-continent supports as many regional cuisines as its recognised languages. The real image of sub-continental cuisine is that of the shape of the country itself, a richly adorned elephant’s head, sparkling with unusual gems and delicate traceries of silver and gold thread. While most Indian restaurants in Australia stick with the British Raj to the broad forehead (the central and northern states), you won’t appreciate the full splendour unless you also take in the ears ( Pakistan and Bangladesh ) the hefty trunk (the southern states of Goa, Kerala, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu), and its pendant nose-ring ( Sri Lanka ).

Perhaps part of the problem is that Australia doesn’t have regional cuisines. We’ve begun to value regional and local credentials for individual products – King Island cheeses, for example – but single items do not make a regional cuisine. Regionality is defined by whole cuisine shifts in taste, preparation, presentation and consumption. At its most basic, it comes from geographic and climatic differences that produce variations in indigenous plants and animals from which to build a cuisine. Virtually nothing of what we eat in Australia is indigenous. Our tables are dominated by foods of migration, and as migrants from a particular country are dispersed across Australia so their food is dispersed. We are increasingly likely to find the same foods wherever we travel in Australia . That isn’t so in India . I remember the disbelief of a French couple on finding that the village café out of Kovalum in Kerala had not heard of samosas. Gus D’Souza, owner-chef at Pyrmont’s Viva Goa tells of northern Indians who themselves have never known that Goanese food is different.

Jaiprakash Margasahayam has been satisfying diners with his southern Indian all-vegetarian food since 1998 at Woodlands Family Restaurant, first in Liverpool and now also in Parramatta . The main differences between Northern and Southern Indian food, he says, are the use of rice instead of wheat, using every bit of the coconut (oil, milk, flesh), using tamarind and lime for sharpness in flavouring, and in the spices and flavourings. The latter is nowhere more evident than in the styles of rice served at Woodlands –tamarind, sesame seeds and curry leaves (tamarind rice); y oghurt, cashew nuts, green chillies and mustard seeds (curd rice); turmeric and lime, with a garnish of mustard seed, curry leaves, and roasted lentils (lime rice). Like the others I spoke with for this story, Jaiprakash substitutes vegetable oil for coconut oil these days, partly for health reasons – coconut oil is high in bad cholesterol – and also because of its strong flavour, though he retains it in dishes like avial, a mixed vegetable dish that must be finished off with a dressing of coconut oil and curry leaves. Southern food, he adds, is often a lot wetter, for example the sambhars (thin lentil and tamarind/tomato based broths that are often distinctive to particular localities) that are an essential accompaniment to the idli (steamed lentil flour dumplings) and dosai (riceflour pancakes). Southern food is also generally not deep fried or baked as some northern food often is. Steaming and shallow frying are more common.

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Regionality can also be affected by other than physical factors. Being a strict Hindu, Jaiprakash will never serve any form of meat. When he began people tried to dissuade him. ‘They said, 99% of Australians eat meat, how come you are taking such a bold step and opening a vegetarian restaurant’. His decision paid off, not just in the popularity with an Indian and Australian clientele, but with Woodlands winning the 2003 Restaurant and Catering NSW award for best metropolitan vegetarian restaurant.

At Viva Goa, on the other hand, Gus D’Souza happily admits that the vegetable dishes and the paneer peri-peri on his menu are ‘a concession to my north Indian wife’. Vegetable other than potatoes and tomatoes were virtually absent from his family Goan Catholic Peri-peri is there because Goa for the last 500 years has gone about creating a true fusion of already existing southern Indian food and flavours with those of its Portuguese colonisers. The menu reads like a short course in the top ten hits from Portugal circa 1400, with a sub-continental tweak. Peixes Calangute are redfish fillets with cloves and chilli, crumbed with semolina and fried. Sorpotel is roast pork cooked in a chilli and garlic sauce and a dash of feni, a cashew nut based liquor (the cashew nut is native to southern India ). Ale Belle is a dessert of a fennel pancake stuffed with date and fresh coconut topped off with ginger preserve (a Chinese spice trade influence) and vanilla ice cream.

Sri Lankan food is also influenced by its Portuguese and Dutch colonisers. At Janani, lampries is always on the menu. Okay, so I’m biased, but I defy anyone to show me a rice dish superior to this 400 year old take on Indonesian rijstafel; rice cooked in stock, traditionally accompanied by a complex mixed meat curry, spicy meatballs, vegetable curries and sambols, all wrapped up and baked in a banana leaf. Sri Lankans love arguing about what exactly should be in lampries, the differences again demonstrating how much regionality in food is also about regional identity. So, the lampries that comes out of the Jaffna Tamil background of S.A.Karunaretnam (‘it’s okay just to use the initials’, he insists) is different to that served up by Singhalese backgrounded Sunil Ranasinghe, owner-chef at Sunil’s @ Thornleigh. Jaffna Tamil food on the whole is again subtly different to Singhalese food. While Singhalese meals are built around boiled rice or the oily translucency of a godamba roti, a Tamil daily diet would be unthinkable without dosai and idli and their sambhar and chutney accompaniments. Singhalese curries also invariably use rampa (pandanus leaf) and sera (lemongrass) as flavourings. Tamil curries, like southern Indian curries generally, don’t. But the two come together in their use of tamarind, dried fish, coconut milk and fresh coconut, and the two classic rice flour dishes hoppers (a bowl shaped pancake with the most delicate laced edge) and string hoppers (thin rice vermicelli made into a mat and then steamed).

Regionality is about identity and it’s also about authenticity. Like his peers, Zahid Ali, owner-chef at Faheem’s Fast Food, stresses this. Self-taught, he continues to collect recipes and techniques on his visits to his home in Pakistan . Also like the others, he is passionate about the need for freshness in the food he makes and about using different spice combinations (masalas) to emphasise the distinctiveness of each dish. They are critical of much of what passes for Indian food in Sydney as being made days in advance from a limited palate of masalas not ground fresh each week or each day when necessary.

Pakistani food shares much in common with that of northern India , tandoori cooked meats and breads being popular. But there are essentially Pakistani dishes too; haleem (lamb and lentils slow cooked for 8 hours till they merge into something wonderfully and entirely different), nihari (lamb again, this time cooked for 6 hours till you can eat it with a spoon) and katta kat (an offal eaters’ delight of brains, liver, and other tasty bits chopped fine and mixed with spices and chilli, the name coming from the sound of cleavers in action).

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At Himalaya , so revered is chef Mushtaq Ahmed by his Pakistani customers that they call him ustad, teacher/master. Here, the only clue that there are Pakistani specialities is a single line on the menu, or the surprise you get when your neighbour customer is clearly having something that doesn’t appear to be listed. It’s a strategy used by other Pakistani restaurants, too. Encourage custom by what looks like a standard northern Indian menu; suggest that they try some of the specials, and hope they like them enough to ask for them again. It’s working; Australian diners in the know are avid for the charga chicken, a whole chicken skinned, covered in a turmeric and spice mince, with a spiced rice stuffing, the whole of it the cooked in the tandoor. Ustad is also a master sweet maker and makes the best ras malai bar none in Sydney , and I’ve tried many of them.

When Guy D’Souza first began cooking only Goan dishes, it wasn’t unusual for his customers to accuse him of conning them that the food was Indian. Some walked out. The heartening news from all of them is that while in the beginning their customers were mostly from their communities, anywhere from 75% to 90% of their customers now are other Australians. ‘They all like the spiciness of our food’, says Zahid, ‘and they really like the chilli. Often they have it hotter even than we do’. ‘They don’t always know the right names for the food’, says Jaiprakash. ‘Vadai (a deep fried lentil cake typical eaten as a snack) they call a ‘lentil doughnut’. At Himalaya , those who can’t remember the word charga ring and ask for ‘the special chicken’. But no-one cares about that. Their businesses are growing rapidly. Janani tripled its space in a year. Faheem’s jumped overnight from a 15 seater to a 60 seater.

So, next time you think Indian, get out of the rut and explore a regional cuisine or two. Elephants never forget and you won’t either.

Restaurants mentioned in this article:

Viva Goa . 2 Scott Street , Pyrmont. Ph: 02 9566 1311

Woodlands Family Restaurant. 238 George St , Liverpool . Ph: (02) 9734 9949 AND Shop 4 & 5, 55-67 George St , Parramatta Ph: 9633 3838

Janani. 32 Burlington Rd , Homebush Ph: (02) 9763 2306

Sunil’s @ Thornleigh. 280 Pennant Hills Rd , Thornleigh Ph: (02) 9481 8241

Faheem’s Fast Food. 196 Enmore Rd , Enmore. Ph: (02) 9550 4850

Himalaya . 1/205 Great Northern Rd, Five Dock. Ph:(02) 9712 2726

Some do’s and don’ts when eating regional Indian food

* Respect those who would prefer you not to drink in their establishments for religious reasons.

* If samosas aren’t on the menu, don’t ask for them. Try a vaddai or pan roll or a cutlet. If samosas are on the menu, try something different anyway.

* Be prepared to wait. Dosai, idli, hoppers and such are made to order. If hungry, see above.

* A lot of this food is made for eating with you fingers. Dosai, idli, hoppers are all made to be torn up and used to soak up the wet curries, sambhars and chutneys. Give it a go and taste the difference. It’s polite to wash your hands first, and no-one is going to be upset if you use your left hand too.

* Always ask what vegetables they have fresh on the day. It’s a great way to be introduced to food like okra (bhindi), bitter gourd (karella), breadfruit, jak fruit and other Indian and Asian vegetables now readily available in Sydney .

* Ring in advance and tell them if you there are things you don’t eat. They want you to try their food and will often go out of their way to prepare something special for you.

* If you are uncertain how to eat the food you order, ask the floor staff, or another customer who knows. These are people who take delight in other Australians trying their food and will do everything they can to make the experience a good one for you.

* Oh, and anyone on an Atkin’s diet should stay away.

Copyright (C) 2004 Paul van Reyk

The post An Elephant Never Forgets appeared first on Buth Kuddeh.