I - Indian
It’s an oft-repeated culinary truism that the food you eat in Indian restaurants bears no resemblance to the food of the subcontinent. I’m sure this is entirely true. I’m sure that the fish cuisine of Kerala has to tasted (preferably in situ) to be believed and that the spice mixes of the North have an intoxicating and evanescent finesse that disperses like incense smoke when exported.
The problem is that ‘Indian’ has changed so far and so fast that it’s achieved critical mass. It’s a thing alone, like tinned peaches and baked beans - delicious in its own right. Whether you trace it to the Raj, Lascar seamen in London Docks or the first waves of mass immigration, a fork was formed in the evolutionary tree of Indian cooking and the product of our curry houses is a result.
Uniquely tailored to British taste, brilliantly developed by a fertile and entrepreneurial industry, the Ruby Murray is now demonstrably more British than boiled beef and carrots and we’re all the better for it.
Bores who’ve had fish grilled by the locals on a gap year in Goa or who nibbled lightly at spiced petit fours in the Lake Palaces should be conspicuously ignored as the showoffs they are. It matters not if the chicken is battery. No one cares if the menu has 85 options but we only ever order three of them. No-one gives a toss if the sauces are all created in giant vats on an industrial park just outside Birmingham. A properly policed curry blowout with a bunch of mates in a Brick Lane curry house, ticks all the boxes of sensual pleasure, sharing, bonding and congenial hospitality.
When was the last time you got all that at a dinner party?