Britain's relationship with spices runs from Roman pepper pots and medieval banquets through the East India Company and Victorian curry powder to the curry house and today's global larder.
Overview¶
British cooking is often caricatured as bland, but Britain has used imported spices for nearly two thousand years, and at times used them extravagantly. Its tastes swung from the heavily spiced banquet food of the Middle Ages, through a long period when spices retreated into puddings, cakes and pickles, to the enthusiasm for South Asian and other cuisines that shapes British eating today.
Roman and early medieval Britain¶
Pepper reached Britain with the Romans. It is mentioned in writing tablets from the fort at Vindolanda near Hadrian's Wall, and one of the treasures of the Hoxne Hoard, buried in Suffolk in the early 5th century, is a silver pepper pot in the form of an empress's bust, with a mechanism for dispensing ground pepper.
Spices did not vanish when Roman rule ended. The monk Bede, dying at Jarrow in 735, is recorded by his pupil Cuthbert as having distributed his few treasures, including pepper, to fellow priests. Pepper and other spices appear in Anglo-Saxon medical texts.
The medieval banquet¶
In late medieval England, noble and royal households cooked with lavish amounts of ginger, cinnamon, saffron, cloves, mace and grains of paradise. The Forme of Cury, compiled about 1390 by the master cooks of Richard II, is the key English source. Saffron was grown in England from at least the 14th century, above all around the Essex town that became Saffron Walden; production continued into the 18th century. Mustard was the everyday spice, grown at home; Shakespeare's Falstaff mocks a companion whose wit is "as thick as Tewkesbury mustard". See medieval spice cookery.
London's spice dealers organised early: a Guild of Pepperers is recorded in 1180, and its successors formed the Grocers' Company, chartered in 1428.
Tudor and Stuart England¶
Spices remained status goods. Gingerbread, spiced wafers, comfits and banqueting sweets were fashionable, and a tradition, not well documented, credits Elizabeth I with having gingerbread figures made in the likeness of her guests. On 31 December 1600 Elizabeth chartered the East India Company, which aimed at the spice trade but, outcompeted by the Dutch in the Spice Islands, turned to Indian textiles, then tea, and eventually to ruling much of India. See the Dutch East India Company.
From the late 17th century, following French fashion, English elite cooking moved away from heavy spicing toward butter, herbs and the flavour of the main ingredient, while spices lived on in baking and preserving.
The sweet spice tradition¶
Much of Britain's medieval taste survives in festive and baked food:
- Mince pies and Christmas pudding, once containing meat, still spiced with mixed spice, cinnamon, nutmeg and cloves.
- Hot cross buns, simnel cake, parkin and gingerbread.
- Mulled wine and wassail; see mulling spice.
- Potted shrimps and potted meats with mace.
- Pickles and chutneys, flavoured with pickling spice, mustard seed and chilli, many adapted from Indian models.
Curry comes to Britain¶
Returning East India Company employees brought a taste for Indian food. Hannah Glasse's The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy (1747) includes a recipe "To make a Currey the India way", seasoned with pepper and coriander. In 1810 Sake Dean Mahomed, who had served in the East India Company's army, opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in London, the first known Indian restaurant in Britain; it closed within a few years. Ready-mixed curry powder was sold from the late 18th century, and curries appeared in Victorian cookery books by Eliza Acton and Isabella Beeton, usually as a way to use leftover meat.
Other lasting products of the 19th century include Worcestershire sauce, first sold by Lea & Perrins in Worcester in 1837 (the story that it was made to a recipe brought back by a local nobleman from Bengal is company lore, not established fact), and Colman's mustard, milled in Norwich from 1814.
The curry house and after¶
Post-war migration from South Asia transformed British food. Many of the "Indian" restaurants that spread across Britain from the 1950s onward were run by people from Sylhet in what is now Bangladesh, who developed a restaurant style of their own, with dishes such as the madras, vindaloo and jalfrezi served at different heat levels. Chicken tikka masala is widely believed to have been created in Britain; several restaurants, notably the Shish Mahal in Glasgow, claim it, and the origin is disputed. In 2001 the Foreign Secretary Robin Cook described it as "a true British national dish".
📌 Not just curry
Caribbean, Chinese, Turkish, Middle Eastern, West African, Thai and many other communities have also shaped the British spice cupboard. Supermarkets now routinely stock sumac, zaatar, gochujang and harissa, which would have been specialist items a generation ago.
See also british cuisine and indian cuisine.