How shows like 'Ugly Delicious' are helping explode the myth of a universal curry powder

At the end of a long day’s shooting in Mumbai for the hit Netflix show Ugly Delicious the host, the US chef David Chang and his friend, comedian Aziz Ansari, landed up at a McDonald’s in Nariman Point.

It wasn’t because after eating Indian food all day for the “Don’t Call It Curry” episode, which recently released online, they were eager for a fast food break. But one idea for the show was to look at how McDonald’s has Indianised its menu and what this says about local tastes.

This can be a fun way to get a snapshot of local tastes — Japan, for instance, has shrimp burgers and Italy slathers buns with Nutella — but there was one problem. The team didn’t actually have permission to shoot at a McDonald’s in India so all they could do was film Chang and Ansari entering and taking away their orders to eat on Marine Drive. (This episode didn’t make the final edit.)

When they entered McDonald’s, the young manager on duty instantly recognised Chang from the first season of Ugly Delicious. Far from being apprehensive about having the high-profile chef in his outlet, he was thrilled. While he couldn’t let them shoot inside, he happily led them through the menu — recommending piri piri fries — and eagerly asked Chang if he had plans to bring his Momofuku chain of restaurants to India. (Personal disclosure: I feature briefly in the episode, showing Chang and Ansari around a vegetable market in Mumbai and a thali restaurant. All this was in an informal and unpaid capacity and the final show was as much a revelation to me as anyone else.)

Expectations run high with international shows like Ugly Delicious. Chang starts by asking why a food culture as ancient and varied as India’s is not better known globally, and many people were clearly interested in the answer.

When news broke that he was coming to India, social media had many suggestions for what he should cover — and once the final episode released, it erupted again with approval or criticism of the show’s choices.

This is to be expected. People are passionate about food and like to see their choices validated. But it shouldn’t matter much beyond friendly arguments. Chang himself acknowledges in the show that “if you’re Indian you don’t need anyone else’s approval”. What the world feels about Indian food makes no difference to how and what we eat in India. One Netflix episode will hardly make much difference.

And yet the reaction of that young Mc-Donald’s manager in Mumbai shows the value of such shows. If they can enthuse a new audience about food issues, get them to ask questions, argue and look for new experiences, then that is of real value. A global platform like Netflix also reaches beyond just the English-speaking world, to countries that we rarely consider when we think about the potential of Indian food.

Ugly Delicious is primarily aimed at the American market, but Chang’s question could equally be put to most European countries, or much of Asia beyond the Indian subcontinent, or South America and Africa. It is really only countries in the former British empire that have some awareness of Indian food, first from Indians who went or were taken there in colonial times, and more recent migration due to their English-speaking link.

Food culture in these countries, like the UK and Australia, now demonstrates familiarity with Indian food by disdaining the idea of “curry powder”, and this features in Ugly Delicious as well. By contrast in France “le curry” is still called for in a few classic dishes, like mouclade, mussels in a curry-flavoured sauce.

According to Larousse Gastronomique, the French cooking encyclopedia, they even fixed the composition of curry powder, something no Brit or Indian ever tried: “In 1884, at the Universal Paris Exhibition the composition of curry powder was set by decree: 34 gms tamarind; 44 gms onions; 20 gms coriander; 5 gms chilli pepper; 3 gms turmeric; 2 gms cumin; 3 gms fenugreek; 2 gms pepper; 2 gms mustard.”

Shows like Ugly Delicious help explode the myth of a universal curry powder, but they can also set up a second myth — that Indians never use curry powders, but grind spices fresh for every dish. Recipes in such places start with a long list of spices and, ironically, this creates a prejudice that Indian food is very complicated and also spicy, because people just scan the names of the spices and not the actual amounts that end up going in the dish.

In reality, of course, Indians use masala powders all the time, and these reduce the cost and, above all, the effort that goes into regular cooking. Another point rarely made about curry powders is that as much as taste, they are about the texture of the dish. Coriander powder, for example, which is a large part of most spice mixes, is a very effective thickening agent. The bulk of East Indian bottle masala, a well-known spice mix in Mumbai, is simply toasted, ground wheat, which thickens watery curries to the ideal texture for eating with rice.

Points like these can be made once an interaction with Indian food has got going, and for all the inevitable limitations of what can be crammed in a single episode, shows like Ugly Delicious manage that. And as that young Mc-Donald’s manager who was so delighted to meet Chang in Mumbai showed, they also build a wider appetite for food interest of all kinds.