Image: Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner · Public domain
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
- Year
- 1888
- Era
- 19th century
- Origin
- India · South Asia
- Language
- English
- Category
- South Asia
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, first issued in 1888, is a domestic manual co-authored by Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner to guide British memsahibs in managing households in colonial India. Combining recipes with instruction on servants, hygiene, nursing, and accounts, the work went through many editions over several decades and became a standard reference for Anglo-Indian domestic life, offering valuable insight into the culinary and social culture of the Raj.
Cooking from this book
Mulligatawny Soup
Signature dishMulligatawny is the dish most often linked to this celebrated Anglo-Indian household manual. A spiced, lightly thickened soup born of British attempts to adapt a southern Indian pepper broth for the colonial table, it became a staple of memsahib dining rooms across the Raj. Steel and Gardiner's guide, written to instruct newly arrived Englishwomen in running an Indian household, helped fix mulligatawny in the popular imagination as the quintessential Anglo-Indian soup.
An editorial note on a dish associated with this book, written for The Coquinist. It is not a reproduction of the book's recipe.
