“The Bangladeshi, Indian and Pakistani immigrant cooks in 1970s England who added tinned tomatoes, ginger, garlic and chili to tandoor-forged chicken to make tikka masala weren’t undoing centuries of tradition: they were innovating and adapting a living cuisine that has sustained itself not by pandering to foreign cultures, but by absorbing them. The inauthenticity of curry is its greatest claim to its position as a reflection of global history and the present politics of hunger, eating and identity.”

Naben Ruthnum, Curry: Eating, Reading and Race, 2017,