Curry: A Biography

by Lizzie Collingham

336pp, Chatto & Windus, £16.99<br

Most people are aware that the curry we eat after the pub on Friday nights has little to do with what is simultaneously being consumed halfway across the world in the domestic dining rooms of Mumbai or Madras. What we may not be quite so clear about, however, is the way that the kormas and kedgerees of Mughlai and Madras cooking are themselves in a constant state of evolution, shifting and transforming themselves as they pick up flavours, ingredients, imagined degrees of smartness and fashionability from around the world - even, indeed, from the curry houses of Bradford or Southall. One of the most telling anecdotes in Lizzie Collingham's book concerns a second generation British man who prefers the Anglo-Indian dishes that he eats in the family restaurant to the food that his parents cook at home.

What this smart little book does is unpick some of the pathways by which various meats, fish, fruits and rice came together at particular moments in history to produce, say, a lamb pasanda or even our own particular favourite, chicken tikka masala ("curry", it turns out, is a generic term that Indians themselves would never use). In the process she neatly undercuts our fantasies about origins, beginnings, and authenticity, the possibility that there is a place somewhere high up in the hills where you can still taste these dishes in their original form. For Indian cuisine, it turns out, has always been a glorious bastard, a repository of whatever bits and pieces come to hand.

In 17th-century Goa, for instance, it was the visiting Portuguese who taught the local Indians how to make the exquisite egg and milk-based sweets that have since become part of the fabric of eating on the western seaboard. By way of reciprocity, the natives taught the Portuguese how to be clean: not previously known for their personal daintiness, the settling Europeans started lathering up and changing their pants with a regularity that amazed newcomers as they reached for yet one more helping of bebinka, a delicious mix of coconut milk, eggs and hunks of palm sugar.

There again, 300 years later, it comes as a shock to learn that Indians of all castes were indifferent to the pleasures of tea-drinking until the beginning of the 20th century. It was only when their British rulers insisted that they try it for themselves, sweetening the experience with the promise of all the money that was to be made from this new cash crop, that the subcontinent gave itself over to the cup that cheers.

At times these stories of culinary and cultural elision become almost dizzying. One of the oddest stories in the book concerns Sadaat Ali Khan, an early 19th-century princeling who was so enamoured of all things British that he not only imported the best English china on which to serve up meat and two veg every evening, but also became the proud owner of a British admiral's uniform and, even odder, a clergyman's outfit. Collingham ends the anecdote there, and so we will never know if the Nawab of Lucknow preferred to eat his boiled beef and carrots while dressed as Nelson or Parson Woodforde.

In one of the best chapters Collingham charts the process by which Indian food entered Britain and carved out for itself a very special place in our hearts. It was in the 1840s that lascars started jumping ship in the port of London (and Singapore, Southampton and New York too) and setting themselves up as cooks. Given that they all came from the same jungly patch of what is now Bangladesh, it was inevitable that their particular rice-heavy, pork-free cuisine came to represent "Indian food" to the casual British mind. Even now, of the 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain, the vast majority are run by Bangladeshis who come from what is still known at home as the "Seaman's Zone". It is against this virtual monopoly that a new generation of earnestly authentic (and more expensive) restaurants, boasting their exclusive attachment to Mughlai, Goan or Keralan cuisines, have had to do battle for the hearts and minds of British diners.

Collingham ends her "biography" (the sub-title is a slightly lazy and unconvincing borrowing from Mark Kurlansky's unlikely hit of 1998, Cod: A Biography) by following curry through to its current manifestations around the world. The strangest phenomenon is, perhaps, provincial Britain's enthusiastic endorsement of curry and chips, which neatly combines our two favourite fast foods into one alcohol-mopping delight. A lighter day-time option might be a white bread sandwich bought from one of the smarter chains with a filling of chicken tikka. But it doesn't stop there. In rural Fiji, people who have never travelled out of their village eat Punjabi chapattis made from indigenous coconut milk, a legacy of the island's heavy dependence on indentured Indian labour in the 1870s.

In Japan, meanwhile, you can grab a curry from a stand at the station, or stuff yourself silly with it during school dinner, where it is easily the most popular item on the menu. Part of curry's particular appeal, suggests Collingham, is the way that it positions itself outside Japan's elaborate culinary laws of purity and perfection. Rather than having to fiddle around endlessly with slivers of fish to produce the immaculate sushi, curry is a forgiving slop that can be poured over rice and eaten with a western spoon. It is, in short, the perfect comfort food for a broken heart or a diet that has, once more, gone down the pan.

· Kathryn Hughes's biography of Mrs Beeton is published in the autumn. To order Curry for £15.99 with free UK p&p call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.