The History of Curry in Britain: 1700s to Today

An eighteenth-century arrival

Curry entered British kitchens long before it entered British hearts. Trade with the Indian subcontinent through the East India Company brought spices, cooks and appetites back to Britain from the seventeenth century onwards, and by the mid 1700s the word curry was appearing in print. Hannah Glasse's celebrated cookery book of 1747 includes an early recipe to make a currey the India way, calling for coriander seed, pepper and a chicken or rabbit browned and stewed. It is a modest, cautious thing by modern standards, using only a couple of spices, but it marks the moment curry crossed from anecdote into instruction.

These early curries were the food of the wealthy and the well-travelled. Returning colonial officials, army officers and their households, sometimes nicknamed nabobs, brought a taste for spiced food and the means to recreate it. Coffee houses and taverns in London began offering curry to a curious clientele. The dish carried an air of the exotic, a small edible souvenir of a distant empire.

Britain's first curry house

A genuine milestone came in 1810, when Sake Dean Mahomed, a Bengali entrepreneur, opened the Hindoostane Coffee House near Portman Square in London. It is generally recognised as Britain's first dedicated Indian restaurant, serving Indian dishes and hookah pipes in rooms decorated to evoke the subcontinent. Commercially it did not last, closing within a few years, but its significance is symbolic and enormous: it was the first attempt to sell Indian food to the British public as a restaurant experience rather than a home-cooked curiosity.

The Victorian appetite and the rise of curry powder

By the nineteenth century curry had settled comfortably into middle-class domestic cooking. The key to its spread was standardisation. Rather than grinding individual spices, cooks reached for ready-mixed curry powder, sold commercially and hugely convenient. Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, that Victorian bible of the respectable home, included curry recipes and treated the dish as an ordinary part of the repertoire, often as a thrifty way to use up cold leftover meat.

This was curry adapted firmly to British tastes and ingredients. It leaned on curry powder, was frequently thickened with flour, sweetened with apple or sultanas, and served with rice as a mild, uniform sauce. The nuance and regional variety of subcontinental cooking was flattened into a single, dependable flavour, but the habit was set: spiced food had become part of the ordinary British table.

Post-war migration and the modern curry house

The curry landscape most people recognise today was built after the Second World War. Migration from the Indian subcontinent, and above all from the Sylhet region of what is now Bangladesh, brought thousands of people to Britain to work and settle. Many found their way into catering, and from the 1950s and 1960s onwards a distinctive institution took shape: the neighbourhood curry house.

These restaurants, often family-run and open late, standardised a menu that had little to do with any single region of the subcontinent and everything to do with what British customers wanted. A shared base gravy, prepared in bulk each day, allowed a cook to turn out korma, madras, vindaloo, dopiaza and dozens of other dishes to order in minutes. The system was ingenious, fast and consistent, and it defined the British curry experience for generations.

• The base gravy method let small kitchens offer huge menus with speed.
• Dishes were graded by heat, from mild korma to fierce vindaloo, giving customers a familiar map.
• Late opening hours made the curry house a fixture of the British night out.
• Family ownership passed skills and businesses down through generations.

Birmingham, the balti and regional invention

British curry also began generating its own inventions. In Birmingham, from around the 1970s, the balti emerged: a dish cooked and served in a thin pressed-steel bowl, eaten with bread rather than rice and prepared fast over a high flame. The area of the city where it flourished became known as the Balti Triangle. Whether or not the balti has precise roots in the subcontinent, it is unmistakably a product of British Asian kitchens, a dish invented here for the people eating here, much like chicken tikka masala.

The later twentieth century saw curry move fully into the mainstream. Supermarkets stocked ready meals and cook-in sauces. Brick Lane in London became shorthand for the curry district, its restaurants tightly packed and famously competitive. Curry stopped being a Friday-night treat and became a weekday staple cooked at home from a jar as readily as ordered from a menu.

Today: refinement, regionalism and reinvention

The modern British curry scene is more varied than at any point in its history. Alongside the traditional curry house sit restaurants showcasing specific regional cuisines that earlier generations rarely encountered: Keralan seafood, Goan pork, Hyderabadi biryani, Gujarati vegetarian thalis, Punjabi grills. A wave of chefs has pushed South Asian food into fine dining, winning critical acclaim and challenging the idea that curry is only cheap, casual comfort food.

At the same time the classic curry house faces real pressures, from staffing shortages and rising costs to changing high streets. Yet the appetite endures. Curry is woven into British life in a way few imported foods ever achieve, celebrated as a national favourite and, in dishes like tikka masala, claimed almost as a native creation.

From Hannah Glasse's tentative 1747 recipe to a Keralan tasting menu three centuries later, the story of curry in Britain is really a story about the country itself: its trade and empire, its waves of migration, its willingness to borrow, adapt and eventually embrace. Curry did not simply arrive in Britain. Over three hundred years, it became British.