It all starts the minute we step out of Good Friday’s evening mass. Mum jots down fifty two things to be bought, and asks dad to swear he won’t lose her handy yellowing notebook when he goes marketing tomorrow. Weekly marketing is an anglo’s favourite hobby that magnifies ten fold when it’s a festival. The “meat guy” is called, the spice list is revised, and ten things are left for Sunday morning — in sheer confidence.
Anglo-Indians are a unique community that make up a small, but distinctive part of India’s cultural fabric. As the name suggests, it refers to people of mixed Indian and English lineage. A community, roughly two million in 1947, now down to 300,000 – 1,000,000 from data accumulated back in 2010.
While adapting and integrating ourselves into the Indian fabric, we’ve managed to retain peculiarities and traits that make us uniquely us. One such peculiarity is the food itself. A distinct cuisine that draws from a mixed heritage, creating new dishes that have significantly contributed to the rich backdrop of Indian cuisines. Pepper water, vindaloo, jalfrezi, and good ‘ol mutton stew are some of the well known dishes from the community. But what’s beautiful about the community’s food is that it stands testimony to the fact that food is, and always will be the centre of everything— the story of adaptability, integration, and settling deep into what we call home.
In Lucknow, this writer was born into a small but fiercely proud pocket of Anglo-Indian life that has held on through generations— grandparents who spoke of memsahibs and chota pegs, parents who navigated the shift from club dances to Ramadan nights in Aminabad, and now me, carrying the plate forward.
Easter Sunday morning is void of pastel bunnies or chocolate hares and is taken over by the unmistakable aroma of sizzling whole spices, the fumes of sliced pungent onions lingering in the air, the low but lively chatter of the house elders yapping, bickering, and wondering if the younger lot will wake up “next easter or what?”.
As the day slowly pushes past noon, and whiskeys are poured alongside shandys (beer and sprite) and a vigorous game of Housie is played. The dishes make it to the table that’s adorned with a starched tablecloth (the good one, ironed within an inch of its life), mismatched cutlery, and a centerpiece of dyed eggs. Some boiled and painted with vegetable colours, some picked up from Cupid’s Bakery (the equivalent of Delhi’s Wenger’s), the latter waiting to be cracked open by the kids in a delightful theatrical ceremony after lunch!
We begin by awakening the palate and settling the stomach with pepper water. A thin, fiery and almost medicinal bowl of steaming joy. An Anglicised rasam that’s sharpened with tamarind and curry leaves, the kind that clears sinuses and pumps you up for what’s to come. Beside pepper water, there’s a tray of homemade shammi kebabs whose flavours merge Lucknowi garam masalas with silken mutton and channa dal, shallow fried till they’re crispy and dark brown on the outside, devoured with rumali rotis.
Then comes the holy trinity that defines every Anglo-Indian occasion. Ball Curry, Yellow Coconut Rice, and Devil’s Chutney. Or as we cheekily call it the “bad word curry” since in the old days “ball” was considered too vulgar a word for polite company, hence the nickname. The balls themselves are made up of tender ground mutton or beef, mixed with ginger, green chillies, and just enough garam masala to hold them together. They’re fried, then lowered into a gravy of onions, tomatoes, and other masalas. This is paired with yellow coconut rice or even plain yellow jeera rice along with the Devil’s Chutney. ‘Bum burner’ as we call it, is a blazing red relish made up of onions, red chillies, vinegar, a hint of sugar, salt, that’s ground rough. Its name comes from the colour, and not the heat despite it being capable of bringing anyone to tears in a good way.
No Easter table is complete without more meat. There is Mutton Curry, slow cooked until the meat falls apart, the gravy thick and fragrant with Lucknow’s spices but unmistakably Anglo. Sitting pretty besides it is Pork Vindaloo, not the goan vinegar heavy version, but adapted for Northern white rice. Another star is the Beef Glassy/Dry, a robust fry with onions, pepper, and green chillies, coined ‘glassy’ because of how translucent the onions become; this is usually eaten as is, or with homemade chappattis.
To balance the richness or to indulge further, you also spot a degchi filled with Bhunni Khichdi. Not the watery kind we turn to during sick days, but a fragrant, roasted kind made of rice and moong dal along with whole spices and ghee usually paired with the mutton curry, or eaten as is with a dollop of dahi and pickle on regular days.
Lastly, once the mains are cleared up, the dessert comes through. Nothing garish, nothing laborious. Just two humongous bowls of canned apricot, and canned fruit alongside a huge bowl of cream. Tinned apricots in their sweet syrup, spooned generously into bowls and drowned in thick, fresh cream. It is the taste of every Anglo-Indian childhood; the contrast of tart fruit and silky dairy devoured before the easter eggs are cracked open, and trades for the toffees inside them begin. We pass them around like blessings.
The lull after lunch and before tea time is filled with a couple rounds of Housie. The faces around the living room—cousins who have moved out of Lucknow, parents whose hair has silvered but the food they make always tastes exactly the same, the youngest ones wide-eyed and slightly unaware of the feast they indulged in. This food is more than calories. It’s in our DNA. Anglo-Indian cuisine was born in the colonial kitchen, where Indian ayahs taught British memsahibs the magic of masala, and English palates learned to crave the heat of chillies tempered by coconut milk and vinegar.
In a world that sometimes forgets the small communities, the Anglo-Indian Easter table is an act of defiant joy. We eat, we laugh, we argue over who gets the last ball, and in doing so we keep alive something precious, a cuisine, a culture, a way of loving through food that no history book can fully capture.
And every year, as I take my place, I say a quiet thank you to the generations before me who kept the spices alive. Pass the Devil’s Chutney, please. Easter has only just begun.
