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Kedgeree and British Colonial India
A lot of work has been taking place recently to reconsider British colonial history. The vast colonial “possessions” constituted, as many children were taught in school, “the empire on which the sun never set.”
The legacy of colonial power has been, some have argued, superior administrative and legal systems; education; railways; cricket. The benign paternalism of governmental assistance has been, according to some, inestimable.
Well, revisions to that record have rightly included brutal wars of conquest, a dehumanising trade in slavery, the expropriation of natural and manufactured goods, the purloining of precious metals, an arrogant belief in the “white man’s burden”.
All these — and more — must remain central to the accounts.
But a softer side to this argument lies in the cross-fertilisation of cultures that have enriched each other.
Nowhere is this more readily seen than in culinary culture. And nowhere has contributed more than the British Raj, the Indian subcontinent. Two hundred years ago, the first curry house opened in London. Now, Indian takeaway meals have overtaken fish and chips as the go-to meal for many in Britain.
Not surprisingly, it was British civil and military personnel living and working in India who first developed a taste for the spices of India. The trading of the rightfully maligned East India Company began to ensure that such condiments began to arrive in Britain well over two centuries ago. One of the first to marry Indian spices with local foods was a lady called Stephana Malcom.
Stephana Malcom was a Scot, born in 1774 and living in Dumfriesshire, which is in the southwest of Scotland. She was one of seventeen children (there’s no error with that number!). Her picture, which must have been an early daguerreotype, held in the National Library in Scotland, displays her fierce demeanour and it seems that was an accurate portrait: Her brother apparently described her as “the graveyard of all my jokes”.
Be that as it may, Stephana kept a journal with a record of her recipes and therein appears…
