2/1/2024 0 Comments Queen victoria"There were two high-ranking tables – the household table and the queen's table. "Curries were referred to as the 'Indian dish,'" says Gray. In the late 1880s, says Gray, curries feature on Victoria's menus twice a week - as a lunch dish (chicken curry) on Sundays and as a dinner dish (fish curry) on Tuesdays. Nor would they use the curry powder in stock in the kitchens, though it was of the best imported kind, so a part of the household had to be given to them for their special use, and there they worked Indian-style, grinding their own curry powder between two large round stones and preparing all their own flavoring and spices." Victoria's Swiss cook, Gabriel Tschumi, who joined the kitchens as an apprentice in 1898, described how the Indians did everything from scratch, using only halal meat and grinding their own spices: "For religious reasons, they could not use the meat which came to the kitchen in the ordinary way, and so they killed their own sheep and poultry for the curries. Soon, curry was being served on a regular basis at her dining table. It was not regarded as a high-class food." In any case, in Victorian England, curry was a way to use up leftover meat and vegetables. I once cooked a Raj-style curry and it started off with frying cucumber and apple - and I thought, really? But if you take it on its own merit, it's really nice if still slightly bonkers. "They used fruit, were heavy on turmeric and galangal, and were creamy and mild. "Those early curries, which I call Raj or Anglo-Indian curries, were not what we would recognize today," she says. How?īut, as Gray points out, the curries Victoria ate in her youth were quite different from the one Karim cooked her. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. "Long before Karim, curry de poulet appeared on the dinner menu at Windsor Castle on December 29, 1847."Ĭlose overlay Buy Featured Book Title Victoria & Abdul Subtitle The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant Author Shrabani Basu "She definitely had curry before Karim," says British food historian Annie Gray, who chronicled Victoria's lavish appetite in her book, The Greedy Queen: Eating with Victoria. This was scarcely the first time Victoria had tasted curry, a dish which had become popular in England in the late Georgian period, with a variety of curry pastes and powders available in the stores. 20, 1887, the queen noted appreciatively: "Had some excellent curry prepared by one of my Indian servants." Karim was viewed as the late Brown's replacement - snidely referred to in the movie as "the brown John Brown" - and his closeness to the queen, though her feelings were clearly maternal, scandalized the royal household.īut a spicier outcome of this friendship was the elevation of a dish already popular in England: curry.Ī few weeks after kissing her feet, writes Shrabani Basu in Victoria & Abdul: The True Story of the Queen's Closest Confidant (the book on which the movie is based), Karim cooked Victoria "a fine Indian meal: chicken curry, daal, and a fragrant pilau." In a diary entry on Aug. Over the next 13 years, until the queen's death in 1901, Karim was constantly at her side, even spending a night alone with her in her cottage in the Scottish Highlands, where she and Brown had passed the time together. The Salt From India To North Korea, Via Japan: Curry's Global Journey Within a year, he had gone from being what the English dismissively referred to as the "kitchen boy" to the queen's "Munshi" (teacher). But Victoria was so taken by the young Muslim man that she asked him to teach her Urdu (then called Hindustani). Karim had been sent from Agra to London as a "gift from India," to wait at the queen's table. Victoria & Abdul is a nostalgic colonial romp redeemed mainly by Judi Dench's stirring performance as an obstinate old lioness, but it shines the spotlight on this highly unconventional relationship that dominated the lonely queen's final years and broke the boundaries of race, class and religion in an era defined by these hierarchies. It was the start of an extraordinary friendship - and the theme of a syrupy new film. As he knelt to kiss her feet, she was struck by what she described in her diary as his "fine serious countenance." Some inexplicable connection was made that day, with the queen, who was still grieving the death of her beloved Scottish servant and companion John Brown, deeply drawn to Karim. On the third morning of her Golden Jubilee celebrations in June 1887, a tired Queen Victoria was greeted by a tall, bearded young man in a scarlet tunic and white turban. And despite all opposition, Victoria and Karim curried on.Īlexander Bassano/Spencer Arnold/Getty Images In the last 13 years of Queen Victoria's life, she spent a great deal of time with Abdul Karim, who came from India initially to wait on the queen's table, but soon became part of her inner circle.
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