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Curry, the catch-all term that has come to signify Indian dishes, is a favorite in the UK. The country has over 10,000 curry houses (Indian, Pakistani, or Bangladeshi restaurant serving curries). Robin Cook, a former foreign secretary in the UK (their version of a foreign minister), once claimed that chicken tikka masala was "a true British national dish not only because it is the most popular but because it is a perfect illustration of the way Britain absorbs and adapts external influences." High praise" and a lot of bombast, skeptics might say. But it’s not entirely untrue. Indian cuisine has found many takers in the UK since the early 1800s, and they have Queen Victoria to thank for that.
Indian spices and curries had already made their way to Britain in the 1700s. A cookbook from that era, Hannah Glasse's Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, published in 1747, had a recipe titled "How to make a currey the Indian way." To put that in perspective, the recipe was published 10 years before the Battle of Plassey. The first Indian restaurant in the UK – The Hindostanee Dinner and Hooka Smoking Club—opened around 1810 but was short-lived. So, the British weren’t complete strangers to the Indian style of cooking. But pungent curry wasn’t considered classy, and French food was much more popular, so Indian food was a novelty at best.
Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 after the death of the previous king and her uncle, William IV, and became queen at the age of 18. Not much is known about her preference for Indian food from that time. Two decades later, the atrocities of 1857 saw Britain take over formal control of the East India Company’s holdings in India.
By this time, Indian cuisine had acquired wider acceptability. It wasn’t just the exotic food eaten by British officers of the Raj or the curious new thing called Anglo-Indian food made by the Raj officers who brought new recipes back to Britain that blended Indian and British styles. As one book published in 1857, Modern Domestic Cookery, noted, "Curry, which was formerly a dish almost exclusively for the table of those who had made a long residence in India, is now so completely naturalized that few dinners are thought complete unless one is on the table."
In 1876, she was given the title Empress of India, and she was said to be quite keen on visiting India, even writing that she would have loved to visit the Taj Mahal. But she never did visit because the journey by sea took too long. Interestingly, she sent artists to India so they could paint portraits of India and its people to help her understand the land. It’s said she even tried to learn Urdu and Hindi.
In 1887, Victoria, 50 years into her 63-year-long reign, had two Indian servants. One of them was the (now famous Abdul Karim, aka the Munshi, from Agra. The queen grew very fond of her Indian servants, and Abdul in particular. (The 2017 film Victoria & Abdul is a look at the unlikely friendship of the British sovereign and her Indian helper.) Abdul introduced Victoria to Indian curries, and, if some accounts are to be believed, the queen declared the food "excellent" and decreed curries be cooked in the royal kitchens every day.
Her enthusiastic endorsement meant that the curry had pride of place in the royal kitchens. It wasn’t long before the rest of the nobility took notice and looked beyond previous notions of what was acceptable cuisine for the aristocracy. Queen Victoria had made curry fashionable. There’s more than one claim that she loved mutton cutlets, chicken curry, and daal.
Since then, curry has been adapted to British tastes. Indian-style cookbooks became more common towards the end of the 19th century. One popular book was 1895’s Anglo-Indian Cookery at Home by Henrietta Hervey. A popular food writer of that era, Eliza Acton, noted "the great superiority of the oriental curries over those generally prepared in England," largely attributable to the simple fact that the original ingredients were harder to come by. That created a demand for a product that could come close to the "original curry taste," leading to the creation of a product we now know as curry powder. These curry powders were popular with middle-class Brits who wanted to know why the upper class was taking to foreign food from the colonies. They also figured out that curries were a good way of using cold meats.
In truth, though, the curry powders weren’t very close to the Indian curries they tried to emulate. So, they had a British version of curry. Some have argued ever since that curry was a British creation anyway. In any case, supply issues aside, curry was a thing enjoyed mostly by the upper classes, while the middle class was less enthused until the latter part of the 20th century.
After World War II ended, as Indian immigration to the UK increased, Indian food grew in popularity. The rest is history. In the 1960s, a Scottish gentleman in Glasgow complained that his chicken tikka dish was a bit too dry, so the chef of the curry house tried to rectify the tikka by adding tomato soup and garnishing it with coriander and yogurt. The dish was named "chicken tikka masala," a lazy effort at naming by any measure. But it would do pretty well in the next few decades.
