"Half the taste and colour of the curry would be destroyed if it were cooked in the very peculiar way that an English woman in England once cooked it.

`This is my rice and curry day,' she explained to an Indian acquaintance who had accompanied her husband's regiment to England. `Would you like to stay and see me make it? I believe you Indians do not know how to cook.'

"Her friend expressed her willingness, and many a time after she told the story with amusement.

"The Englishwoman tied a teacupful of rice in a muslin bag, and boiled it in a saucepan of water. She then took a small plateful of cold scraps of meat, one week's savings, and put it in another saucepan with some curry powder, some butter and stock, and proceeded to boil it.

"When she thought both rice and curry -- save the mark -- done, she untied the muslin, served the rice in a flat dish, made a hole in the centre of the rice, poured the curry into it and served the unappetising stuff. ..."

Quoted from The Wife's Cookery Book of 1906 in The Raj at the Table: A Culinary History of the British in India, by David Burton. London: Faber and Faber, 1993.