Spice islands

To celebrate the 60th anniversary of Indian independence, the restaurateur and cookery writer camellia panjabi has created a curry specially for The Times. Below, damban whitworth reports on the enduring appeal of India's greatest gift to Britain

he late Robin Cook's declaration, in 2001, that chicken tikka masala was Britain's "true national dish" caused a bit of a stir at the time. But a few years later his words have become a platitude, and no less accurate for that. Sixty years after Indian independence and the creation of Pakistan, there is an enormous two-way flow of people, ideas and trade between Britain and its former colonial possessions. But food is probably the greatest of all the subcontinent's influences over British life. Where once Indian food was an exotic jolt to jaded northern European palates, today British children grow up on spicy dishes that seem as commonplace as fish and chips, just as happy to snack on poppadoms and chutney as on Marmite on toast. Ready-to-eat Indian dinners are now a £1 billion market and by some estimates the average British person eats Indian-inspired food twice a week. Curry is so much part of the fabric of our lives that it has even entered rhyming slang. The music of Ruby Murray, a popular Irish singer of the 1950s and 60s, may be obscure but her name lives on. Of course, the British have been enjoying the taste of India for far longer than the past six decades. When merchants of the East India Company started plundering South Asia, agents of the Empire soon acquired a taste for spicy Indian food and brought it back to Blighty. It didn't achieve great popularity, but the groundwork was laid. Curry lunches in the officers' mess were a firm tradition long before chillies entered the mainstream. The real explosion in popularity of Indian food began in the 1970s with the arrival of Bangladeshis, fleeing their troubled country and bestowing on a nation with a desperate culinary reputation the Indian takeaway and the flock-wallpapered curry house. Bangladeshis still own the majority of what we call "Indian" restaurants in Britain. On the whole it is not that easy any more to make jokes about what the food will do to your insides because the quality has improved to the extent that total disaster is usually averted. I was in one of my favourites the other day, a little place called Desh in Highbury, run by second-generation Bangladeshis who boast that they use 32 herbs and spices in their food. Four of us ate like kings for £40 and the owner even threw in some free Cobra beers because the chef was taken by surprise by two orders at once and...