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PROGRAMME 1: DELHI
BACKGROUND
The expert
Rouni was mentored by Lubna, who has taught Indian cooking for 15 years.
Indian food in the UK
Indians first arrived in Britain on the ships of the East India Company in the 17th and 18th century. The very first Indian restaurant in this country was the Hindostanee Coffee House, which opened in London in 1809 and offered 'Indian food of the highest perfection'. More restaurants sprang up in the early 20th century, but they were mainly simple establishments, patronised by Asian immigrants who were missing the flavours of home. The first 'upmarket' Indian restaurant was Veeraswamy's in Regent Street, which opened in 1927, but numbers didn't increase dramatically until the '60s and '70s. By 2000 there were almost 8,000 Indian restaurants in Britain turning over more than £2 billion a year and employing some 70,000 people.
Spices
Spices have been part of British cuisine since the days of the 14th-century Crusades, long before we'd begun to explore India. By the early 17th century, spices such as cumin, caraway, ginger, pepper, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg were available to all but the most poor. They were used, not just to add savour to food, but to cover up the rank flavours of poorly preserved food that was well past its use-by date. Commercially produced curry powder first appeared in the 1780s.
Samosas
Samosas – the word derives from their medieval Persian name, sanbosag – were probably bought into India by Asian traders. Easy to cook and highly portable, the samosa was the perfect snack for travellers, and recipes for similar stuffed pastries crop up in countries from Egypt to China. Samosas were certainly an established part of Indian cuisine by 1300, when the Delhi poet, Amir Khusrao, noted how much the royal court enjoyed, 'samosa prepared from meat, ghee, onion and so on'.
Today, samosas are still made in the traditional way, with a slightly flaky, pastry envelope snugly enclosing a filling of spicy meat or vegetables, then deep-fried until crisp and golden.
