Controversial Curries: United States Dietary Reformers and the Re-Racialization of Curry in the 19th Century

Vegetarian reform in the 19th century was a deeply racist enterprise; one so rife with nationalist overtones that Kyla Wazana Tompkins has called it “imperial dietetics.” Its advocates promised that dietary abstinence would create a strong, white nation. But they faced a critical challenge to this national focus: India, a nation which had been largely vegetarian for centuries, yet whose people received their racist ire. It was a problem encapsulated by a question posed to Sylvester Graham by a potential convert in 1832: “Why are the Hindoo & other Eastern Nations a proverbially degraded & weakly race,” he asked, “although they live exclusively on rice and other vegetables?” Graham answered this question simply: “their favorite curry powder”

The association of curry with India and Indians helped dietary reformers resolve a potential inconsistency. But by 1832 most people in the U.S. no longer connected curry with the nation of its origin. By 1832, curry was common enough that many cookbooks contained “American” recipes for the spice and its utilization. Graham (and other dietary reformers’) association of curry with India would stick, though. Over the course of the 19th century, U.S. consumers would increasingly see curry as a foreign spice. By the late nineteenth century, it was marketed in cookbooks and restaurants as “exotic.” Though the vegetarian movement was not successful in many ways, it was strangely successful in changing consumers’ perceptions of curry.

This paper traces perceptions of curry among U.S. dietary reformers, arguing that they effectively re-exoticized and re-racialized curry to suit their needs. Curry’s history thus represents an interesting reversal of the typical food narrative of introduction and assimilation - it was unassimilated. Its story is illustrative because curry was, instead, an edible point of reference for navigating race, imperialism, and cultural contact in an age of increasing globalization.