Last week, I talked to some students at Queensbridge School about the history of Balti as part of their excellent project highlighting all things Birmingham. It was great to see Balti featuring in their poetry highlighting their love for their City …. definitely some budding poets and artists and a credit to their School!
Balti seems to have made a good impression in Canada, thanks to a press visit during the Commonwealth Games! ….
Interesting to note that the recent English Curry Awards 2022 held in Birmingham didn’t feature one genuine Balti restaurant. It’s also a fair bet that all the award winners were of Bangladeshi rather than Pakistani derivation. It would be interesting to find out whether the organisers even knew what was an authentic Balti!
In preparation for the opening of the Commonwealth Games, BBC Sports visited the Triangle and were taken to a few shops to get a feel for this unique part of the city. As one would expect they visited the iconic Shababs to both film and taste a proper Brummie Balti. Other stops included Raja Bros supermarket, a local sweet centre, a sari shop, a jewellers and a Pakistani truck stop style restaurant … all good ‘PR’ for the City!’
The Daily Mail recently published an article on the top 40 destinations to visit in the UK. Pleasingly balti was third but yet again the photo of a normal curry serving plate didnt do Birmingham’s iconic dish any justice.
Revealed: The 40 UK travel experiences to try before you turn 40, with stargazing in Northumberland No.1 and a spectacular Scottish road trip ranking second.
Third place in the ranking goes to a visit to Birmingham’s Balti Triangle, the culinary birthplace of the ‘Balti’ curry, followed by a canal boat staycation in fourth.
For Fathers’ Day, my daughter thoughtfully bought me an interesting little book called ‘The Philosophy of Curry’ about the history of curry by Sejal Sukhadwala who apparently is a regular contributor to the Guardian Time Out and BBC Food. Furthermore, her book comes with a testimonial from the gushing Nigella Lawson who further gushes ‘a Magisterial Must Read’. In fairness, it’s an interesting look at the history of curry until it comes to the matter of the derivation of balti. To quote … ‘based on the food in Baltistan’ (WRONG!) and not a word about it’s proper derivation and also clarifying the balti pan’s customized Birmingham shape, the materials used ie. thin pressed steel not cast iron etc and the critical fact that the balti is both fast cooked and served in the same balti pan. So Birmingham and balti gets yet another raw and uninformed deal from a foodie writer. Why am I not surprised?
There’s been a lot of publicity over Johnny Depp and his crew splashing out a supposed £50,000 on a ‘do’ at Broad Street’s Varanasi. Not sure who his adviser was but he could have had a real taste of Brum by buying 5,000 proper baltis with a naan bread as an accompaniment or perhaps more practically entertained his party of 50 for around a tenth of the price and got his champagne from the local offie … leaving over forty grand for a worthwhile charity.
Perhaps his expensive shindig says something about the man!
In this TV series, the vacuous Sarah Cox presents a competition which recently featured ‘Indian’ takeaways from different parts of the country … Edinburgh, Bradford (billed as the curry capital!), London and Newcastle. Notice the usual big city name missing and to rub it in the groups of diners judging were Manchester based. The one consolation is that we didn’t suffer the culinary pain of seeing the usual ‘pseudo’ Balti being served.
This week saw a gathering of curry royalty at Shababs, in the form of Richard Sayce aka curry author Misty Ricardo and Andy Lees who set up the highly successful Facebook page ‘The Balti Club ‘with a multitude of loyal followers. They were given access to the kitchen and under the watchful gaze of head chef Zaf Hussain, it has to be said that Richard cooked up a mean balti! What I love about these guys is that they champion British Indian Restaurant (BIR)cuisine and recognise that food is about continual evolvement with enjoyment as the goal and that you don’t have to be eating an exact recipe from the 18th century for it to be ‘pukka ‘ food. Not for them the posturing of the many culinary pseuds who purport to champion the ‘authentic’ roots of Indian cuisine. (Maddhu Jaffray anyone?)
The quest to preserve the authentic Balti and to educate the public, particularly those born in the noughties onwards, goes on.
In adding a chapter to a proposed new reprint of my book ‘Going for a Balti’, I commissioned a survey amongst Brummies about their awareness of the authentic dish. Alarmingly, less than a quarter surveyed knew what was the authentic culinary article.
I also noticed that the Visit Birmingham website, in its reference to Balti, showed restaurants who weren’t purveyors of the real thing and even featured shiny stainless steel dishes … balti blasphemy! In fairness, following my plea, they have rectified this so that, at least, visitors will be able to recognise!’