Food Culture in Colonial Asia

A Taste of Empire

Cecilia Leong-Salobir

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781136726538
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: History
• Thema: Social History

Presenting a social history of colonial food practices in India, Malaysia and Singapore, this book discusses the contribution that Asian domestic servants made towards the development of this cuisine between 1858 and 1963. Domestic cookbooks, household management manuals, memoirs, diaries and travelogues are used to investigate the culinary practices in the colonial household, as well as in clubs, hill stations, hotels and restaurants.

Challenging accepted ideas about colonial cuisine, the book argues that a distinctive cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people, and included dishes such as curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, country captain and pish pash. The cuisine evolved over time, with the indigenous servants preparing both local and European foods. The book highlights both the role and representation of domestic servants in the colonies. It is an important contribution for students and scholars of food history and colonial history, as well as Asian Studies.

1 What empire builders ate

With the curry – mutton, chicken, fish, prawns, or hardboiled ducks’ eggs – came a dozen different side-dishes and savouries, some of them calculated to make the curry even hotter than it was already. As well as one or two dishes of curried vegetables, there would be an assortment of little dishes containing mango chutney from India, ikan bilis (tiny dried fish), red chilli sauce, a salty relish called ‘Bombay duck’, shredded coconut, fried peanuts, chopped-up tomato and white onion, sliced banana, cucumber, and other bits and pieces. … The curry was always followed in the old Straits tradition by a local sweet called Gula Melaka.¹

The fundamentally hybrid character of the colonial cuisine derived from a multiplicity of influences, including the food practices of the Britons who ruled India, Malaysia and Singapore and the food traditions of the indigenous peoples from these colonies. The development of this distinct and separate hybrid cuisine among Britons can arguably be seen as the precursor of fusion food. Significantly, this cuisine developed largely through the reliance of colonizers on their domestic servants for food preparation. Among the handful of scholars to have considered food history and imperialism, some assume that consumption of certain types of foods became markers in distinguishing the colonials from the colonized. This school of thought contends that British colonizers consumed only British types of food in order to differentiate themselves from the colonized.² This chapter, in contrast, argues that the British did not eat only British foods but foods strongly influenced by Asian cuisines. Indeed, it demonstrates that the food practices of the British in Asia constitute a recognizable and legitimate cuisine with distinctive features. Furthermore, this colonial cuisine evolved over time and was not a deliberate act of imposing imperialistic designs but involved a process of combining local and European ingredients and dishes through the efforts of the indigenous servants, under the broad direction of their memsahibs. In departing from what other scholars maintain, this book contends that a distinct colonial cuisine emerged as a result of negotiation and collaboration between the expatriate British and local people. Nevertheless, within this relationship there was space for social distance and separation. This chapter reconstructs the emergence of the colonial cuisine by examining Anglo-Indian and other colonial cookbooks, and personal accounts from my questionnaire, diaries, autobiographies and travelogues.

In food production and consumption, there was no clear-cut colonial divide between two opposing sides. I have examined whether certain foods consumed by the colonizer were peculiar to each colony. This study argues that the colonial experience was a fluid enterprise and foods eaten by colonizers in each colony made geographical leaps to other colonies, and, in the process, post-colonial societies adopted and adapted to ‘colonial foods’. Anglo-Indians came from different occupational backgrounds, from the armed forces, administration and commerce, and different classes with different dietary habits. The colonized in India were from different castes and classes, again with different dietary practices, and these influenced the food practices of Anglo-Indians. Thus, the colonial cuisine was a hybrid cuisine with some elements of British foodways and components of foodways from the colonies.

The cuisine that was adopted by the majority of the British in India, Malaya and Singapore was replete with peculiarities and idiosyncrasies that evolved over decades and were influenced by various factors, such as the availability of Western and local food, cooking facilities, input by domestic servants and traditions from the home country as well as the colonies. This was in spite of the diverse groups of British colonizers who came from varied backgrounds, in the government sector were administrators, health professionals, educators, military personnel; in the private sector were importers and exporters, retailers, those working on agricultural plantations and still others engaged in missionary work. Each group adopted food practices peculiar to their social standing and their professional status. Within India there were differences in foodways in the presidencies, districts, hill stations and urban centres. In colonial Malaysia and Singapore dietary habits differed between those who lived in urban centres and those in rural environments. Differences also existed temporally – food habits were markedly different from the time when colonial rule first began to the period immediately preceding independence. In addition, the groups from which domestic servants in the colonies came were just as disparate. The diversity of the groups that were in differing castes, ethnicity, races and religions added their peculiar influences to food and food preparation. The colonial cuisine with its hybrid dishes of countless types of curries, mulligatawny, kedgeree, chicken chop, pish-pash and the inimitable meal of tiffin (light lunch or snacks, the Sunday curry tiffin is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3) was familiar and recognizable to the colonial community and only absent in the grand banquets at Government House. The colonial cuisine persisted well beyond the end of colonial rule for both ex-colonizers and postcolonial societies and has survived in some of the clubs, hotels, restaurants and rest-houses in the colonies as well as in the homes of former colonials spread across the globe. Respondents to my questionnaire indicate that they revisit their favourite dishes of the colonial era at home. At the same time, there seems to be a following among the elite in postcolonial societies who frequent those clubs and hotels where the cuisine survives.

Victorian meal times and food practices in Britain and its Asian colonies

In nineteenth-century Britain, new dietary practices were evolving in this period of rapid social transformation. The choice and preparation of foods, meal times and order of service were socially important and defined class demarcation. As the preparation and consumption of food became the focus of Victorian life, this task became a housewifely responsibility.³ This gendered role was transplanted to the colonies where the memsahib’s role as homemaker became even more important, to be elevated where possible, as the exemplary imperial household. This section highlights the food habits of the affluent in the Victorian era, as it was the British upper classes in England that the Anglo-Indians and other colonials in Southeast Asia tried to emulate in their lifestyle. The increasing size and wealth of the middle classes in Victorian England from the 1850s contributed towards setting the trends in homes, dress, employment of servants and food.⁴ Fruit orchards and vegetable gardens expanded and processed foods became popular. Food manufacturers processed new and exotic foods. Crosse & Blackwell manufactured about 40 different pickles and sauces, Colman’s mustard went on the market, curry powders were sold and ‘Indian’ sauce or Worcestershire sauce was invented.⁵ The variety of foodstuffs increased even more as more produce from the colonies was brought back to Britain. In addition, food distribution was made easier with the development of the railway system.⁶ In the Edwardian era, the new monarch, as the leader of the fashionable elite, entertained with huge feasts. Johnston stated that King Edward, noted for his epicurean tastes, set the standards in haute cuisine and this was imitated by those who could employ a first-class French chef and a large retinue of servants. Breakfast at Sandringham included haddock or bloater, poached eggs, bacon, chicken and woodcock. Luncheon and dinner were 12-course affairs and the late night snack might consist of plovers’ eggs, ptarmigan and salmon.⁷ As for the middle classes, their dinner parties consisted of eight to ten courses and displayed the ‘culinary savoir faire of the mistress of the house as well as the economic well-being of the household’.⁸ In early nineteenth-century India, the same largesse was evident on dinner party tables that boasted a large turkey as the centrepiece, an enormous ham, a sirloin or round of beef, a saddle of mutton, boiled and roasted legs of mutton, chicken, geese, ducks, tongues, ‘humps’, pigeon pies, curry and rice, more mutton (chops) and chicken (cutlets).⁹

The eating habits of returning East India Company merchants and officials had popularized curries in private homes and coffee houses in the eighteenth century. Curries featured regularly in breakfast menus in British cookbooks by the second half of the nineteenth century. The Breakfast Book, published in 1865, listed ‘curries’ among the eggs, preserved meats, steaks, chops, offal, fish and preserved fruit for breakfast.¹⁰ Other breakfast recipe books also featured curried pigs’ feet, dry curry of mutton and/or dry curry of salmon.

Seen as filling the gap between breakfast and dinner, lunch or luncheon in Britain was already an established meal by the time Queen Victoria came to the throne.¹¹ The working classes had their ‘dinner’ at midday and ‘tea’ in the evening, whereas servants and children had lunch as the main meal of the day. Others considered lunch as ‘the ladies’ meal’ as it was seen as an indulgence¹² and a supplement to morning calls.¹³ It is probable that in the colonies, particularly in Singapore and colonial Malaysia, the Sunday curry tiffin developed into a leisurely lunch after the Victorian fashion. In the late eighteenth century it was fashionable to eat dinner at five or six o’clock but by the nineteenth century the dining hour was pushed to seven, eight or even ten in the evening.¹⁴ Dining late in the evening was due partly to the development of gas lighting and office hours.¹⁵ This change meant supper was either eliminated or replaced by tea or coffee and cakes (cold punch or wine for the men) served at nine-thirty or ten o’clock.¹⁶ In the eighteenth century, dinner was eaten before going to the theatre or public gardens but in the next century the meal became the highlight of the day.¹⁷ The à la Russe style of dinner presentation that emerged in the nineteenth century originated from the Russian nobility and was first introduced into France and later England.¹⁸ Food was served on to guests’ plates from a sideboard by servants, course by course, starting with soup, fish, meat, vegetables and dessert.¹⁹ This meant there was space at the centre (contrasting with the à la Française, where the table would be laden with dishes of food) of the table for elaborate decorations of flowers and fruits.²⁰ Menus were handwritten in French or in French and English. Elaborate cutlery added to the crowded table; formal etiquette also contributed to define class and maintain social distance. While the à la Russe style was adopted by the upper classes, the suburban family could never afford nor manage this style of entertaining (with the average household having only one servant at the most).

It was in the colonies that the Victorian style of gargantuan feasts and extravagant table décor was replicated by the middle classes of Britons who became the ‘new’ elites. The majority of the colonials in Malaysia and Singapore were from middle-class Britain.²¹ Between 1860 and 1874, three-quarters of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) personnel were also from the professional middle classes.²² The domestic servants’ contribution to food preparation was one of the most important influences in the development of colonial cuisine. The domestic servants’ knowledge of local produce, how to source and prepare food and their willingness to work with primitive facilities were compelling factors. However, this is not to say that the domestic servant was singularly responsible for what appeared on the colonial table. Jean Raybould, who spent eight years with her medical doctor husband in Sabah, acknowledges that it was the ‘amahs, local people and shops’ that were most influential in introducing local foods to the colonials.²³ Beryl Kearney, who accompanied her husband on two tours of duty in Malaya in the mid-twentieth century, credited the local cooks and Chinese and Malay businessmen with introducing them to local food.²⁴ As with other analyses of colonial discourses, there was no single predominant factor that precipitated a particular development. That is, it was not a case of the servants deciding that they would cook a certain dish and this becoming part of the colonial’s cuisine.

In spite of the social distance between the colonizer and the colonized, there was room for manoeuvre as well as negotiation and none more so than in foodways. There were the distinctly hybrid di...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. What empire builders ate
• 2. The colonial appropriation of curry
• 3. Servants of empire: The role and representation of domestic servants in the colonial household
• 4. Leisure and segregation: Clubs, hill stations and rest-houses
• 5. Dirt and disease
• Conclusion
• Glossary
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index