Lizzie Collingham

A thoroughly researched examination of how Empire improves efficiency of getting goods to different places around the world but also how it fucks over nutritional availability to its colonies. My only quibble is Collingham's take on British companies trading Indian opium to China- she likens it to the tea that working class Brits used as an end-of-the-day tipple, but opium-derived drugs are still considered highly addictive today over anything from C. sinensis... Regardless, this is chock-full of citations on how Britain impacted global foodways.… (meer)

An enjoyable look at a highly nuanced cuisine. Being one of the guilty people who goes into every Indian restaurant expecting to find and order my favorite dish (paneer makhani 4ever!), this book was a wakeup call. The most fascinating part was when the British Empire took hold because it showed how an entirely new cuisine (Anglo-Indian) was formed by British prejudices, as well as thoughtfully discussing what happened when Hindu purity rules around eating and drinking came up against British colonial social norms. Also quite interesting to me was the spread of Indian and Anglo-Indian food into Great Britain and America, since it spoke directly to my own experiences eating these cuisines.

Not sure that I'll be making any of the delicious-sounding recipes found at the end of each chapter because, as the author notes throughout the book, real Indian cooking is extremely complex. Every recipe needing a cupboard-full of ingredients to chop and grind and marinate is too involved for my style of cooking. Label me a happy eater, leaving the cookery to the experts.… (meer)