Be bold with beer

There’s nothing wrong with a quality lager as an accompaniment to Indian food, but as Ben McFarland reports, there are other options

Diners in the United Kingdom and a host of other countries have been in the throes of a love affair with the food and flavours of the Indian sub-continent ever since colonial pen-pushers and members of the armed forces returned home with tingling tongues and tales of a gastronomic world full of spice and all things nice.

The Brits gave India the Civil Service and in return India gave Britain curry. All in all, not a bad swap really. Today, more than a quarter of Brits eat a curry at least once a week, either at home, in the curry house or the pub, while approximately half of the population go Indian every fortnight. Chicken Tikka Masala, a curry incidentally concocted by the British in the Raj, is now the United Kingdom’s favourite dish and in the last 20 years the number of Indian restaurants in the UK has tripled to more than 9,000.

In nearly every single one of these establishments, lager is the default tipple of choice. Popular wisdom dictates that wine, the delicate little flower that it is, is far too elegant to put up a fight against the power and piquancy of Indian cuisine.

Lager, in contrast, is as synonymous with curry as Ghandi is with flip-flops. The origins of lager’s affiliation with Indian grub are a little shadowy. Some attribute it to the King of Denmark who insisted on drinking his beloved Carlsberg when he visited London’s Veeraswamy restaurant in the mid 1920s.

A more likely reason, however, is that lager’s meteoric rise coincided with that of the curr.....

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By Ben McFarland

Section : Beer and Food

Page number : 40