In Search of the Perfect Curry: A Gender Perspective on Durban Curry in Two Contemporary Cookbooks

Abstract

The article focuses on the meanings of the curry in two contemporary cookbooks, Durban Curry (2014) and Durban Curry: Up2Date (2019). These texts are read partly in conjunction with Indian Delights (originally published in 1961), a pioneering volume focusing on Indian food, which serves as an intertext to the books analysed in this article. The article offers a textual and symptomatic gendered reading that describes some representational and discursive aspects of curry-making as shown in the foodways and foodscapes presented in the two cookbooks. The article motivates that the meaning of curry is not in its singularity, but is instead in the plurality of its shifts, changes, appropriations and mobility over time.