Curries & Bugles: A Memoir & Cookbook of the British Raj

by Jennifer Brennan

Author Jennifer Brennan grew up in the heart of the British Raj in India, a witness to the unique lifestyle and delectable cuisine born of the fusion between the Anglo and Indian worlds. In Curries and Bugles, winner of the 1990 Best Book in Literary Food Writing by the International Association of Culinary Professionals, Ms. Brennan entertains readers with tales from this captivating culture, offering hundreds of recipes for breakfasts, lunches, snacks, teas, celebrations, and more. From Mulligatawny Soup to savory Chicken Stuffed with Apricots, from sumptuous desserts like Kulfi Malai (Indian ice cream) to pungent teas, home cooks can recreate the authentic tastes of the British Raj with ease, while colorful stories from history and the author's own experience amuse and entertain.

Genres: Cookbooks, Food, Memoir, India, History, Nonfiction, Indian Literature

324 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 1990

About the author

While born in the United Kingdom, Brennan and her family had roots in India where her mother and grandmother were born. The author of several cookbooks, she lived a colorful life in a number of Asian countries.

Reviews

[Quo · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of Jennifer Brennan's Curries & Bugles: A Memoir & a Cookbook of the British Raj may seem inclusive enough but in fact, the book is much more than detailed on the cover, also containing a wonderfully instructive history of the British presence in India, with a focus on the period of the Raj, 1858 to 1947. Beyond that, there are very atmospheric black & white images + copious sketches and a series of watercolors by the author. And of course there are the recipes, 200 hundred of them, many Anglo-Indian in conception, i.e. the result of chefs from many different provinces within the Indian subcontinent attempting to cater to a British culinary palette.


Do most care if a cookbook contains anything beyond recipes? In this case, the memoir & historical insights Jennifer Brennan imposes on the reader are quite instructive, telling a story that the recipes alone could not do. And beyond that, anyone with an interest in India or the British colonial experience there would find the commentary as enhancing as the guidelines for an Indian Masala Omelette, Chingree Samosas, Kerala Clam & Shrimp Coconut Soup or Bombay Pudding. Anyone hungry yet?


A favorite of mine & also of the author is Mulligitawny Soup. Jennifer Brennan ate & loved the soup as a child living in Bangalore, the daughter of Major-General Gordon Arthur Thomas Pritchard, C.B.E., to whom the book is dedicated. Here is just one sample of the inserted commentary to go with the recipe for the famous Anglo-Indian soup, apparently concocted by a colonial chef with one British & one Indian parent and later celebrated by a bit of bad verse:

In vain our hard fate we repine; In vain our fortune we rail; On Mullaghee-tawny we dine, On Congee in Bangalore Jail.

Ms. Brennan clearly has one historical foot in imperial India and the other well removed from the air of superiority & the legacy of intolerance, while celebrating the hybrid cuisine that was the result of the experience of empire that previous generations of her family participated in & which she was a party to for the first 15 or so years of her life. Oh & by the way, "Congee" is a very popular rice porridge dish found in India, as well as Burma, China & SE Asia.


Jennifer Brennan represents the 3rd generation of her family to reside in India but very carefully exposes the excesses of the British presence in India, leading to the bloody 1857 Insurrection, also known as the Sepoy Rebellion. In fact, she labels the period beginning just after the rebellion until the start of WWI, the "zenith of the British colonial era in India", with the ultimate loss of the Crown Jewell of the British Empire at the time of independence in 1947, entailing the partition of the subcontinent into (mostly) Hindu India & (largely) Muslim Pakistan, representing a very bloody transition.

The memoir portion of the cookbook includes a description of a "marathon 5 day train journey" in 1943 down the entire length of India with a consist that included the author's mother, her English nanny, 2 Great Danes, 1 cocker spaniel. a Muslim "bearer" (servant) in charge of 27 pieces of assorted luggage, a trip from Rawapindi in present-day Pakistan, along 2,300 miles of track to Bangalore in the south-central part of India, occasioned by the transfer of her father from a military campaign against the Japanese in Burma.

Brennan describes the various Indian foods encountered in dining cars as they threaded their way through different Indian regions & cuisines, changing trains multiple times en route. Obviously, even as a young girl, she was open to all that India had to offer.


I don't think many will attempt to duplicate the recipe for Quails Darjeeling but many of the recipes are rather less challenging. And, there are sections dealing with: "The Spices & Aromatics of India"; "A Proper Tiffin" (lunch but also the tin dishes that enfold it); "The Raj at Tea Time"; "Children's Fare" (including Christmas recipes); and even one dealing with "Bugles & Barracks", i.e. food that would have been served to British troops in India. Another heading is "The Raj Preserved", an excellent treatment of chutneys + the spices & pickles required to preserve them.

Beyond the recipes for food & advice on how to prepare the dishes, I enjoyed the section of "The Raj Imbibes", cocktails to fit British tastes but with some ingredients less than available, an example being this comment from Francis Yeats-Brown on a perfect way to end a hot day under the tropical sun:

We never drank conventional cocktails but had a mixture we called "pink peg" or "Khaitola cocktail". made up by a local chemist, which consisted of Justerini & Brook's best brandy, lashed with a small quantity of chloroform & ether. To this terrific tipple, we added soda & bitters. Its effect was like letting in the top gear of a racing car but we never drank it until the sun was over the yard arm.

In the case of Jennifer Brennan's Curries & Bugles, there is a great deal to enjoy beyond the recipes within her excellent cookbook. Among other books, the author also developed is a book on Thai cooking and another called Tradewinds & Coconuts, dealing with the cuisine of the Pacific Islands. After India, she lived in Japan, Thailand & other ports of call, including California.

*Within my review, the images are of the author; tiffin (lunch) dishes within interlocking containers; a British official in India, 1895; colorful spices at a market in Kerala, South India.

[Kyla · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this every morning over cereal in bits and bites and although every Liberal Arts class I ever had says "ohmygodcolonizationistheworstrunnnnnn", there is something to be said for the stodgy comfort of British food and routines like tea mixed with spicy unpredictable India. Comfort, but not the Edna Lewis kind.

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 5 out of 5]

#Binge Reviewing my previous Reads #Indian Food

When I first picked up Jennifer Brennan’s Curries & Bugles: A Memoir & Cookbook of the British Raj, I half expected something polite, nostalgic, a faintly rose-tinted gloss over the colonial past where Anglo-Indians and sahibs are imagined forever seated at long tables with linen and silver, while ayahs and khansamahs bring in platters of curry and kedgeree.

What I encountered instead was a curious, layered palimpsest: part memoir, part ethnography, part cookbook, part elegy, part inadvertent postcolonial document. Brennan, who was born after the Raj had already ended but inherited its memory through her family’s deep embedment in that world, writes with a peculiar authority. She reconstructs a vanished India not merely through recipes but through the textures of lives lived in cantonments, hill stations, Dak bungalows, railway journeys, and verandahs haunted by gramophone music.

And yet the more I read, the more I realised that this is not just a cookbook or a memoir but a window into how food becomes the grammar of empire, how memory clings not only to landscapes and buildings but to the scent of ghee, the crackle of mustard seeds, the simmer of dhal, the precise etiquette of tea-time.

Reading Brennan in 2025, decades after she first compiled these stories, feels like unearthing a fossil that still retains warmth: the fossil of colonial domesticity, shaped by nostalgia but also by silence, haunted by the unspoken violence of hierarchy even as it delights in the whimsical eccentricities of sahib life.

There is something undeniably seductive in Brennan’s ability to weave anecdotes of her family’s life in India with the cadence of recipes. One moment we are in a dusty cantonment town, listening to tales of pig-sticking expeditions and the peculiar sportsmanship of British officers; the next moment we are following a recipe for mulligatawny soup or pish-pash, with measurements carefully given and the voice of the khansamah hovering behind her words.

This oscillation is the book’s peculiar genius: it neither commits fully to memoir nor to cookbook, but insists on a hybrid form where taste and memory bleed into each other. For me, as a reader who has spent years fascinated by the interplay between literature and food, this hybridity is intoxicating. Recipes alone can be sterile; anecdotes alone can be partial; but together, as Brennan demonstrates, they conjure up a vanished world with more immediacy than any purely historical account might manage.

And yet, to read Curries & Bugles seriously is also to confront the politics that underlie this seductive nostalgia. Brennan’s book is animated by affection: she loves the India her family remembered, the rituals of the Raj, the rhythms of life that seemed so stable before the end of empire. But affection is never innocent.

The Raj, for all its club luncheons and garden parties, was also a system of racial hierarchy, economic exploitation, and cultural imposition. This contradiction is everywhere in the book. On one page, we might be treated to the whimsical account of a grandparent’s eccentricities at Simla; on another, we are reminded of the devoted loyalty of Indian servants whose individuality remains largely unrecorded. Brennan does not consciously probe the colonial wound, yet the wound pulses through the silences.

Reading it in the twenty-first century, after multiple waves of postcolonial critique, one cannot help but see the absences as eloquent: the servant who cooks, the bearer who carries, the ayah who tends to children, all relegated to the background while the sahib’s appetite and nostalgia dominate.

Still, this tension is precisely what makes the book valuable. Unlike a straightforward history, Curries & Bugles does not attempt to explain or defend. Instead, it presents fragments: anecdotes, recipes, images, voices half remembered.

The value lies not in its factual completeness but in its texture, in what it inadvertently reveals about colonial domestic life and its dependence on Indian labour and knowledge. For instance, when Brennan carefully notes the “Anglicised” versions of curries that became standard in cantonment kitchens, she is not consciously theorising hybridity, but she is documenting the process by which Indian food was appropriated, simplified, and transformed into something digestible for the British palate.

The story of curry powder itself — an invention designed to allow colonials to reproduce the taste of “India” back home in England — hovers behind every recipe. In this sense, Brennan’s work belongs not just to culinary nostalgia but to the anthropology of empire: it is a record of how food carries memory, power, and adaptation.

What fascinated me most in reading this book is how it functions as an archive of colonial modernity. We often think of archives as dusty files and government records, but here the archive is edible. A recipe for kedgeree tells us as much about cultural fusion as any official report on Anglo-Indian relations.

A story about a dinner party gone awry with too much spice is an allegory of miscommunication between cultures. Even the very structure of the book — moving between memoir and recipe — embodies hybridity. It is not quite British, not quite Indian, but a third thing: the Anglo-Indian domestic sphere, precarious and now vanished.

As a reader who has grown up in independent India, who has inherited both the legacies of colonial trauma and the hybrid joys of curry and tea, I find myself ambivalent. There are passages in Brennan’s book that made me smile with recognition: the detailed description of monsoon storms, the way life revolved around food and drink, the eccentric improvisations in kitchens where British ingredients were substituted with Indian ones and vice versa.

But some passages made me wince: the casualness with which Indian servants are described, the unquestioned assumption of British superiority, the implicit framing of India as a backdrop for colonial adventures. To hold both responses together — delight and discomfort — is to read the book honestly.

What distinguishes Brennan from some other chroniclers of the Raj, however, is her tone. She is not triumphalist; she is not pining for empire’s return. Instead, she is wistful, affectionate, even self-mocking at times. She knows that the world she describes has gone, and she does not attempt to resurrect it. Her project is more modest: to preserve fragments, to offer readers a taste (quite literally) of what that world felt like from the inside. This modesty is refreshing. It prevents the book from sliding into outright colonial apologia. Instead, it becomes something stranger: a cultural time capsule, an edible scrapbook.

Stylistically, Brennan writes with clarity and humour. Her anecdotes sparkle with detail — the misadventures of officers, the peculiarities of cantonment life, the small dramas of domesticity. She is less lyrical than some memoirists, but her straightforwardness allows the recipes to shine. The recipes themselves are not ornamental add-ons but integral to the narrative. When she writes about her grandmother’s method for making chutney, it is not simply culinary instruction but an evocation of an entire rhythm of life: the gathering of ingredients, the gossip of the kitchen, the seasonal rituals. In this sense, the book is also a work of material culture, preserving techniques and tastes that might otherwise vanish.

To situate Curries & Bugles in a broader literary genealogy, one might place it alongside Elizabeth David’s classic cookbooks, which blended travel, memory, and culinary instruction; or even alongside more contemporary works like Madhur Jaffrey’s An Invitation to Indian Cooking, which attempted to translate Indian kitchens for Western readers. But Brennan’s book is distinct in its colonial framing. It is less about introducing Indian food to outsiders than about preserving the peculiar Anglo-Indian hybrid that emerged in cantonments and bungalows. In that sense, it is closer to memoirs like Plain Tales from the Raj, where anecdote and nostalgia reign.

And yet, the book also forces us to reflect on the politics of nostalgia itself. What does it mean to remember the Raj through food? Food is comforting, intimate, and sensuous. To remember through food is to remember tenderly, to bypass overt political critique. And yet, precisely because food is so intimate, it smuggles in history in ways more insidious than overt propaganda. To crave mulligatawny soup is to crave a world structured by empire, even if unconsciously. As a reader, I cannot ignore this dimension. I read Brennan’s recipes with interest, but I also ask: whose labour made this food possible, whose spices, whose fields, whose hands? The book does not answer, but the questions linger.

In the end, what makes Curries & Bugles compelling is its refusal to fit neatly into a single category. It is not just a cookbook, not just a memoir, not just colonial nostalgia. It is a hybrid, much like the food it describes. And hybridity, however problematic, is also a reality of cultural history. For me, the book becomes a meditation on how empires dissolve but tastes linger, how memory is carried not only in monuments and texts but in recipes and rituals. Reading it is like tasting a chutney where sweetness and bitterness coexist: you cannot separate one from the other.

I closed the book with mixed feelings but also with gratitude. Gratitude that Brennan preserved these fragments, however partial; gratitude that we can, through her words, glimpse a world now gone; gratitude that food, in its stubborn materiality, resists complete erasure. But also a renewed awareness that to truly understand colonial history, we must read not only the affectionate memoirs but also the silences, the absences, the invisible hands behind the dishes.

For me personally, Curries & Bugles becomes less about nostalgia and more about reckoning. It asks me to reckon with my own relationship to colonial legacies, with the foods I grew up eating, with the hybrid dishes that still populate Indian households today. It asks me to see food not only as nourishment but as history, as memory, as politics. And in that sense, it is not only a cookbook or a memoir but a mirror.

[Jbondandrews · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did enjoy reading this book and seeing the many recipes listed and the many things the English got up to at their hill stations and I wonder of all these things what did my ancestors make of all this and did they engage in the same activities or was it different for them as they were for the most part lowly soldiers.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

Enjoyable. If I had wanted it for a recipe book, I would be well satisfied. I had hoped for more narrative, but overall I liked it.

[Patricia · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this book of reminiscensces about the old days of the Indian Raj and the apparently very tasty recipes they enjoyed.

[WF · Rating 3 out of 5]

For some reason this book took me far too long to read, which for me means it wasn't interesting enough. Some recipes worth trying.

[Matt Kelland · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favourite cookbooks.