British food has been quietly transformed by immigration. Here’s the story of the communities, ingredients and cooks who changed what Britain puts on the table.
When chicken tikka masala was described in 2001 by the then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook as a symbol of British multiculturalism, the choice of example was not accidental. Food had become, perhaps more visibly than almost any other domain, the place where immigration’s effects on British life were most undeniably positive and most enthusiastically received. A population that retained enormous ambivalence about the social and political changes that came with mass migration was frequently rather pleased about what arrived in the kitchen.
That observation was less benign than it first appeared. There is something complicated about a country that embraces other cultures’ cuisine while remaining anxious about the communities that produced it. But the culinary transformation of Britain is real, profound and understanding how it happened reveals a great deal about how culture actually changes.
The Long History
The story of immigration and British food does not begin with the postwar Windrush generation. Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth century introduced foods salt beef, bagels, pickled cucumbers that have since become so thoroughly integrated into British urban food culture that their origins are largely forgotten. Chinese immigration in the early twentieth century produced the first wave of Chinese restaurants, initially serving other Chinese immigrants before expanding to a broader audience.
By the 1970s, the British curry house had become a familiar feature of high streets from Aberdeen to Plymouth. By the 1980s, going for a curry was not an exotic act; it was a Thursday night. Each wave of immigration has added layers. Vietnamese food arrived with refugee communities. Polish migration following EU enlargement in 2004 brought a Central European sensibility to food shopping. West African food jollof rice, egusi soup, suya has moved from specialist shops to mainstream restaurant menus. Colombian, Peruvian and Levantine cuisines have found audiences in major cities.
More Than Restaurants
The influence of immigrant communities on British food goes significantly beyond restaurants. The British supermarket has been transformed by the purchasing patterns of diverse communities. Smaller independent retailers serving specific diaspora communities have introduced ingredients and flavours that eventually migrate into mainstream cooking. The Turkish food shops of Green Lanes in London have been quietly supplying pomegranate molasses and sumac to adventurous home cooks for decades longer than those ingredients appeared on television cooking programmes.
Food writers and chefs with family roots across the world have expanded the British understanding of what a “proper” meal looks like. Cookbooks by authors including Yotam Ottolenghi, Ching-He Huang, Meera Sodha and Zainab Mahmood have become mainstream staples in British kitchens each contributing to a gradual but genuine expansion of the culinary imagination.
The Question of Authenticity
This story is not without tensions. The concept of authenticity in immigrant food is perpetually contested. As cuisines enter the mainstream, they are often adapted, sometimes to the point of losing the elements that defined them. Food scholars and chefs from immigrant communities are increasingly vocal about the distinction between cultural exchange and what some call cultural extraction: the pattern by which immigrant food becomes fashionable and profitable in mainstream hands while the communities that created it remain marginalised.
The transformation of what Britain eats is, in some respects, the most optimistic story about multiculturalism that exists. It is a record of genuine absorption of flavours and techniques and ingredients that began as unfamiliar becoming, over time, completely natural. The fact that a British child considers curry, sushi, pasta and jerk chicken all to be unremarkable dinner options represents a kind of cultural openness worth naming as an achievement. Food is not a solution to immigration’s political difficulties. But the global kitchen that Britain has become is a genuine legacy diverse, delicious, and more deeply rooted than any single election cycle can displace.