MY ANGLO-INDIAN COOKBOOK
A unique family recipe book has helped Jenny Mallin to connect with her Anglo-Indian heritage, Adam Rees discovers
Jenny Mallin’s family recipes and stories
Whether it’s diaries, photo albums, letters or the spoken word handed down through the generations, nothing beats a bespoke archive for telling the story of your family and adding colour to the subjects’ exploits. The records can come in all shapes and sizes and, in the case of Jenny Mallin, the central piece of an enviable archive handed down alongside volumes of tales and personal ephemera, was a recipe book. Not only does the book uncover the origins of a distinctive cuisine, but it also reveals the merging of two cultures in India during the height of the British Empire and charts the lives and experiences of one family through five generations.
Jenny has gleaned a huge amount of information from the recipe book and brought it up to date – with a twist. As well as spending countless hours and money converting and perfecting the book’s recipes, Jenny has skilfully woven together the stories of her ancestors in with her own and the history of the British in India into a unique literary journey appropriately entitled A Grandmother’s Legacy.
Since childhood Jenny has been enthralled by the stories of her parents, who embarked with their trunk of belongings and hoarded family paraphernalia from India to England in 1953. “They were archivists, not by trade but by nature,” she says. “They hoarded all sorts of documents from the past and told us stories all the time. They kept every bit of history: old photos, marriage certificates, school certificates, and so on, which people seem not to have around much anymore.”
One of the most cherished possessions was a family recipe book, with entries from four generations of Jenny’s grandmothers, including all sorts of English classics such as calves’ feet jelly and Fair Rosamund pudding, to the Anglo-Indian hallmark Mulligatawny soup, as well as other recipes that were completely unheard of. With handwritten notes, alien measurements, scribbles and symbols, Jenny took what on the surface appeared to be a bespoke family document, combined it with her knowledge from stories and photographs – one of which is incredibly over 150 years old – to form the basis of an amazing family and historical story.
New cuisine
The cookbook itself was started when Jenny’s 3x great grandmother Wilhelmina Sausman began to write down recipes of favourites such as Yorkshire pudding and soup for the family’s cook in Bangalore, India, in 1844. With no concept of these foreign dishes and due to restraints caused by religious beliefs, the cooks and Wilhelmina improvised and experimented with the ingredients around them to develop twists on their favourites from England, the local cuisine and indeed entirely new dishes to invent a wholly unique type of food.
“Although the food is English, it was a fusion because they were influenced by the ingredients around them: a bit of cloves or cinnamon here, or some garlic and ginger to spice something up,” explains Jenny. “You’ve got a whole culture that’s evolved through food and the ingredients around you – it’s fascinating.”
The cooks and Wilhelmina improvised and experimented with the ingredients around them to develop twists on their favourites from England
There are also clues within the book about the origin of some of the new dishes and the family tales that inspired them. Jenny says: “There are recipes for telegram cake and Mahratta curry, which I can’t find anywhere else online. The curry was actually down to my grandfathers who worked on the Southern Mahratta Railway as inspectors, and so my grandmothers affectionately called this ‘Mahratta’ curry. It’s now known in Anglo-Indian circles as ‘railway curry’.”
But while the recipes sit at the centre of the document and form the core of Jenny’s own book, it’s these nuances, as well as details and clues in the handwriting that she has spent years studying, which bring to life the subsequent generations of her ancestors who contributed to the book, as well as providing an interesting view on personal relationships developing between two different cultures.
“From something as commonplace as a book you can glean so much,” she says. “I used the recipe book as a way of learning who my grandmothers were. As I turned the pages, I could see that the writing changed and worked out whose it was. And I worked out what their lives were like from photos and the stories I was told as a child. I built up chapters on each of the grandmothers and cherry-picked a selection of their recipes.” Chefs’ annotations “You can feel a sense of evolution. You can see where each of my grandmothers have added to it, but also where the cooks have added Hindu symbols. You have to be Sherlock Holmes to decipher what’s what. I know, for example, that my grandmother who wrote the Christmas cake recipe had a Hindu cook because he’s written a Hindu symbol for good luck, which is like a swastika. In that one symbol, I can tell he liked my grandmother and the family and there was a good relationship there.”
This one recipe book and extraordinary family archive links generations and seemingly separate stories of one family’s line from the height of the Raj to Jenny’s parents settling in England in 1953, taking everything from the prim and proper standards of a Victorian society 5,000 miles east of London, to the British Indian Army fighting in Mesopotamia in the First World War.
Jenny’s own experiences from her 25 visits back to India and cookery classes across Britain are also included. On every occasion she meets people who remember the odd meal she describes or can reminisce fondly about the British society in India, contrary to the popular historical opinion that has taken prominence since Indian independence.
Though Jenny is quick to acknowledge how lucky she is to have such a bounty handed down from a family of amateur archivists and storytellers, she’s aware of the responsibility to record the tales for future generations of not just her own family, but the entire Anglo-Indian community for whom she’s become something of a reluctant icon. With names and traditions dwindling in recent years, A Grandmother’s Legacy is a labour of love that strikes a far more crucial chord in Anglo-Indian society. Summing up both the importance of keeping one’s family history alive and the spirit of this unique culture, Jenny fittingly concludes: “It’s going to go, so let’s grab hold of it.”