Chooey-Booey and Brown
Tejal Rao
When the great American writer Jeffrey Steingarten was appointed the food critic of Vogue magazine, he made a list of his food phobias—foods, as he put it, that he wouldn’t touch even if he was starving and everything else ran out. This list included kimchi, falafel, and desserts in Indian restaurants. Steingarten’s plan, which sounded reasonable enough, was to expose himself to these foods, over and over again. To wear down his own sense of disgust.
Exposure is a proven method for dealing with food aversions. It goes like this: You have a little taste of what you don’t like. Still don’t like it? Wait a bit, and then have a little taste of it again. You repeat this, at intervals, and in some cases you can sort of trick yourself into changing your mind and liking a thing you did not.
The reason it works is because liking can be learned through repetition. Because a taste for something can be nothing more than a side effect of your familiarity with it (though it might be disappointing to think that way about what you love). In any case, the method worked for Steingarten with some foods. With others, it didn’t.
“Eight Indian dinners taught me that not every Indian dessert has the texture and taste of face cream. Far from it,” he wrote in his 1998 book The Man Who Ate Everything. “Some have the texture and taste of tennis balls.” He sounded a bit like E. M. Forster, who in a report of a meal he’d eaten in India around 1912, referred to the sweets as “brown tennis balls of sugar—not bad.”
Forster numbered the dishes he ate that night, publishing his notes in The Hill of Devi. By his own account, he ate awkwardly. He ate with his hands, cross-legged on the floor of a grand banquet hall, surrounded by busy servants, and feeling anxious the entire time because what if he dropped stuff on the fancy clothes he’d borrowed?
It was, technically, a work dinner. And Forster was pretty dismissive of the food itself. He seemed to find it heavy-handed and rough around the edges, describing some flavors as nothing more than the intense burn of chiles, and some dishes as so unremarkable as to be completely indistinguishable from each other. Three dishes “tasted of nothing till they were well in your mouth, when your whole tongue suddenly burst into flame.”
If these descriptions seem a little familiar, and they probably do, it’s because they’ve been so persistent.
You can hear Indian food characterized the same way now, more than one hundred years later, in conversations and in Yelp reviews and in the work of food writers. These clichés are supposed to fill me with rage, but I have to admit that I also enjoy Forster’s descriptions in a very upside-down-smiley-face sort of way. There’s something about seeing a writer, one who is generally quite good at describing things—a professional!—reduced to his most childish and useless words. Just look at number nine on Forster’s list, the one I’ll never, ever get out of my head: “Another sauce, chooey-booey and brown.” This level of vagueness was the best he could do.
When I read Forster’s book, I was in my early twenties, not yet an American, working as a restaurant cook in the United States. I disappeared into my baggy white uniform. Or that was what I wanted: to know exactly what my job was, to disappear into the doing of it. The job varied. In one kitchen, it was to cook lobsters, to pull the parasitic worms from monkfish livers, to wash the grit out of razor clams and slice them alive, at a diagonal. In another, it was to cut yuzu marshmallows into perfect cubes and cook chocolate caramels and churn five kinds of ice cream.
Weeks into one job, the chef noticed another cook taking time to teach me how to excel at some small but crucial task, routine to that kitchen. At lineup, more than a dozen of us were listening to him, waiting to hear what he’d say about the night ahead. A few of us had notebooks open, ready, pens in our hands.
“You! You must really like curry,” the chef said, turning to the cook who’d helped me earlier, then back to me, then back to the cook. “Do you? Like curry?” he asked me very nicely, like he was asking about something fun, like he was asking at all. And because we often talked about food, it took me a few moments to realize what was going on. I can’t remember if anyone laughed. The cook didn’t comment one way or another; he just looked down at the floor.
I didn’t feel close enough to the word to feel a rush of shame, but I knew I was supposed to. I knew that in the same way all brown people—whether their families trace back to Bangladesh or Pakistan or India—are perceived as Indian in the United States, all food cooked with a few dried spices or chiles, in anything resembling a sauce, is broadly categorized as curry.
The word in English was generic at first. British colonists used it to describe all of the new, foreign, and hard-to-categorize foods they encountered in India, a place they gradually, and violently, absorbed into their empire. What they couldn’t distinguish, they saw as one thing (“chooey-booey and brown”). And what they couldn’t identify or keep straight, they grouped under a single name.
Curry was all of India’s food, made easy. And eventually, curry really did become a dish, made for the British, in British India, by Indian cooks—practically bullied into existence. A dish built to accommodate a misunderstanding, to oblige a collective and willful incomprehension of a vast, nuanced cuisine.
The eighteenth-century cookbook writer Hannah Glasse published one of the earliest recipes for curry in English in The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy. To make a curry the “India way,” she instructed—as if there was one way for all of India, and she knew what it was—you cut up a couple of small chickens and blanched them in water, reserving the poaching liquid for the sauce. Then you pan-fried the meat with some onions, in butter. When the onions were browned all over, you added a mash of turmeric, ginger, and chiles, and eventually the chicken poaching liquid, to make a sauce. You thickened the sauce with cream and finished it all with a big squeeze of lemon juice. Glasse’s book, which was meant to “improve the servants,” was a bestseller for more than a century.
It took a little longer for curry to break through in the United States, but in 1939, Charlotte Hughes reported in the New York Times on “curry restaurants springing up here and there.” By then, curry wasn’t just a dish or a range of industrially produced powders and pastes. It was also a verb—you could curry a chicken. In the accompanying illustration for one article, an Indian man in a feathered turban floats on a magic carpet just above the stove of a befuddled white lady in a ruffled apron, his hands over the curry pot as if mid-incantation. The caption reads, “Curry is a mystery to many American cooks.”
Trudie Teele, an American missionary who had been stationed in Rangoon and Calcutta for more than a decade, wrote a cookbook about curries and later opened an Indian restaurant on Fifty-Seventh Street. She was often quoted as an expert on the subject, and the Indianapolis Star once described her as a woman “determined to recapture for the homefolks the inimitable, tantalizing taste of real curry.”
The Indian immigrant community that had settled in New York opened their own restaurants in Harlem and Midtown. A married couple, Habib and Victoria Ullah, founded Bengal Garden in 1948, just north of Times Square, with financial backing from Ibrahim Choudry. Victoria, who had moved to New York from Puerto Rico, worked front-of-house. Habib, who was from Noakhali and had worked on a ship that took him from Calcutta to Boston, ran the kitchen. Many of the Indian cooks working in New York at the time had experience cooking on ships, and their customers included sailors, students, expats, and Midtown’s theater crowd. But few of those restaurants, or those cooks, made it into stories about Indian food.
“Indian cooks seem to work by instinct,” wrote Hughes. “They couldn’t begin to describe what they do. They’ve been doing it too long. You have to get at the recipe through an intermediary.”
Despite the American obsession with authenticity, with “real curry,” food writers were usually getting their recipes, and their ideas for how Indian food should be served and what it should taste like, through intermediaries, looking right past the expertise and experience of Indian cooks around them.
It meant early American definitions of curry were already removed, mistranslated, distorted. Simply brown your onion and garlic with a premixed curry powder, then add your liquid and citrus juice, one Times article instructed. And because so much of the American understanding of curry was based on that of eighteenth-century British food writers, Americans also considered jarred fruity chutneys, dried salted fish, and wafers of popadam to be crucial accompaniments.
“Curry is just a vague inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us,” wrote the Indian cookbook author Madhur Jaffrey. Though she’d go on to write several books about curry, early in her career she resented the word and resisted its use.
Curry might have started as a kind of oversimplification, but it was transformed and reshaped over hundreds of years until the word spidered out to mean many things, and belong to many people, including Indians. What I wondered for the first time, when it was attached to me in the place where I worked, was if it belonged to me.
As the diaspora splintered and grew, so did the meaning of the word. The Indian side of my family, now mostly in Pune on the west coast, doesn’t use it at all, not to name any of their foods. And the East African–Asian side of my family uses it only with one particular dish, kofta curry, or meatball curry. My grandfather from Kenya—I called him Deddy—made the dish as far back as I can remember, on special occasions and for family gatherings and big Sunday lunches at home.
To make it, the small, soft, juicy lamb meatballs are deeply browned all over and then simmered in a very lean tomato sauce spiked with garam masala and fried ginger and green chiles. Raw cilantro leaves speckle the meat. I make the dish in the same way, with some small variations, and call it by the same name. But ask someone else what curry means, or how to make it, and you’ll probably hear a very different and equally true answer. Which is why “Do you like curry?” isn’t only a vague and tedious question; it’s one that’s almost impossible to answer.
Curry doesn’t refer to one dish, to one technique, to one point of origin, to one paste, to one powder. And it never did. It doesn’t indicate a single texture. It isn’t shorthand for a particular ingredient or precise set of flavors. It’s a catchall, and few culinary words are better at flattening out all of the personal, regional, and historical specificity of an immensely sophisticated cuisine, expressed as it is in different languages, styles, and forms. This is not what I said, of course, that day in the restaurant. Because I said nothing. I was unprepared. I looked at my shoes. They were dirty.
“You must really like curry” is the kind of lazy, unimaginative racism I’d naively assumed people outgrew. It’s soft, bouncy playground stuff (“chooey-booey and brown”), and I didn’t imagine it would be so persistent. I’d moved to the United States almost a decade earlier, as a dependent on my father’s work visa, with what I didn’t then realize were a whole set of privileges, including a fluency in English and the right to work when I turned sixteen.
In Boston, where I went to college after 9/11, people were sophisticated and stealthy with their various brands of racism. So much so that I almost forgot about this variety. The people in charge, the people I reported to, the people who led the various institutions I was a part of—I was used to them practicing racism more privately and politely, which was often so much worse, because without help, it took a little more time to sniff them out and identify their damage.
The curry remark had been tiny but public. It had happened quickly, and then I wondered if it had happened at all. Because everyone was so quiet, pretended they hadn’t heard it, or if they had, it was no big deal, it was nothing, it was just a harmless joke. A harmless joke is what I told myself, until it became clear that the cook who’d helped me once wasn’t going to help me again.
My grandfather emailed me his recipe for kofta curry in the spring of 2010. It’s an email I still reference every time I make the dish, and when I went back to it recently, what I noticed is that he didn’t use the word “curry” in it at all.
Today is Madaraka Day. I am alone at home and the time is 11 o’clock in the morning. I thought, it is the best time to write you. Probably for six people you will need 1 kilo of mince meat.
In a bowl, add the meat, then start adding 1 teaspoon of garam masala, a pinch of red chile powder, 1 tablespoon of dhana jiru (powder of coriander and cumin seeds), 1 tablespoon of green masala (4 cloves of garlic, 1 small piece of fresh ginger, 2 green chiles put into a chopper and made into a paste. You will use what remains for making the sauce).
Also add in the bowl chopped onions of 1 small onion, chopped green coriander, and a pinch of salt. Mix well, and make small round shape balls with your hands and put them on a plate. Now what you have to do is to fry them lightly in a pan with a little oil.
The next preparation is the sauce. In a cooking vessel add the required quantity of oil, maybe a quarter to a half cup. Just check. When the oil is hot add chopped onions (2 small ones) until they turn into a golden brown, now add the remaining quantity of green masala and 3 liquidized tomatoes and keep turning the mixture with a wooden spoon.
Now a pinch of red chile powder, 1 tablespoon of dhana jiru, and 1 teaspoon of garam masala. Add 2 cups of water and salt as required. Cook for 5 minutes or slightly more. Should you need some more water, you can add it. When this process is done, add the fried koftas and cook for 10 minutes. Finally for garnishing, sprinkle with chopped fresh coriander. Well that is all.
I’d already moved into my first apartment in New York when someone told me the block was nicknamed Curry Row, just a little stretch of it, beginning on Sixth Street, where a handful of Indian restaurants glittered with hanging foil decorations and lit up at night with chile-shaped lights. I thought it was cute. All these restaurants where men sat down to play sitar and tablas, and Bangladeshi waiters occasionally stood outside to encourage students and tourists to come in and try the chicken tikka masala, sometimes even handing out morsels of it on toothpicks.
My family didn’t cook it at home, but we knew the dish well as a restaurant curry created, by most accounts, in Scotland, where someone had the genius idea of adding canned tomato soup and cream to chicken tikka to quickly turn it into a gravy.
Outside my home on Curry Row (I never, ever heard anyone call it that, by the way, except to tell me it was called that) the air often smelled of tomatoes, fenugreek, and cream. Coriander and cumin. The savory caramel of browning onions. It was not exactly the smell of my childhood home, but it was a smell I came to associate with home, and if I walked down the street, especially in the late afternoon when the puffy metal vents pumped air from the kitchens, I’d catch it in waves.
That’s when I remembered how my parents used to open the windows when they cooked Indian food and turn on the extractor fan to full blast and light a candle or two on the kitchen counter. They used to close our bedroom doors. They used to worry about the Smell.
The Smell, if we weren’t careful, could adhere to our sweaters, to our dresses, to my father’s woolen suit jackets. It could find its way into our hair and the skin of our fingertips and the sticky depths of our armpits, and we would carry it out into the world, where it would give away—what exactly? Not the particulars of who we were. Immigrants who cooked Gujarati and Konkani food, by way of many other places. Immigrants who were also the sons and daughters of immigrants, and the grandchildren of immigrants who’d landed in the United States by way of Uganda and Kenya, jabbed this way and that by a series of both mundane and violent historical forces. Immigrants who, to be clear, enjoyed extremely delicious things in an often fragrant home.
If the Smell was present in the homes of aunties and uncles, my parents would discuss it on the way home, and not entirely without judgment. I noticed how when our neighbors commented on the Smell—“Something smells good!”—it didn’t matter how earnestly they said it. Because who could be sure what they said behind closed doors? And the Smell was ours, belonged to us even as it left our kitchen, pointed back to us always, like a neon cartoon arrow with rows of flashing lights.
It was, once or twice a week, just the air we breathed. I loved it completely. It was so familiar as to sometimes even be unnoticeable. Because nothing could be more ordinary than mustard seeds and kadi patta leaves popping and crackling in hot oil, tipped into a pot of steaming kadhi, which we’d have with khichdi, all the while insisting that nothing, nothing at all happened at school today. My brother was not punched in the stomach. I was not asked about the color of my nipples. Nothing could be more beautifully routine than a few fragments of cinnamon and clove toasting for masoor dal. Or a pale green paste of ginger, garlic, and chiles sputtering very gently in ghee, cooking but not caramelizing at the bottom of the pan, to start some batata nu shaak.
It was many things, but really it was four hundred years of incomprehension wafting right into the hall, the driveway, the street, the cul-de-sac. And it didn’t really matter what we called it in here, at home, because out there it would be curry, plain and simple. And nothing could clarify it, and nothing could keep it from drifting.