Yes i understand how when the British colonized India and got those exotic spices and the Indians who immigrated to the UK, opened up lots of restaurants there. But still, in my 1st trip to the UK last year, I saw more Indian dishes than Chinese. Heck, even in a Chinese restaurant, we have the option to add some curry sauce on the side. And for the fish and chip shops, you can even have curry sauce to go with the chips and fish.

Is this a culinary thing, i.e. curries are easier to cook? My friend is Indian and although the curries look easy to make, gathering the correct ingredients is very tricky. Missing one and your dish doesnt turn out well. The UK already had these exotic spices so it is easier to make the dish?

Or is it a regional thing? It is freezing in England and so hot dishes like curries are perfect? Traditional stews are kinda bland so something liquid like curry is better?

  • ohulancutash@feddit.ukEnglish
    61·
    16 hours ago

    They aren’t. “Indian curries” are a British invention, where in the C17th onward a vast collection of dishes from disparate and very regionalised cuisines were conflated together by those in the Raj as “curries”.

    These curries were adapted and created for British tastes, and were not eaten by the native populace. When men and later families came back to Britain from postings in the Raj they brought this new cuisine with them, and sometimes their cooks.

    Commercial Anglo-Indian cuisine appears from the 1920s, and with the end of the colony and the partition came a wave of immigrants from Pakistan, who opened up more establishments.

    The boom began with Bangladeshi refugees arriving in the 1970s, about the time when working classes were looking beyond fish and chips for “eating out”. Here British Indian Restaurant cuisine was formed from combining Anglo-Indian and Bangladeshi dishes. BIR is a highly modular style of cooking which allows a great degree of customisation by the customer, an economic use of ingredients, and the ability to fill almost any order within minutes.