Balti (food)
Encyclopedia
A Balti is a British-style type of curry
cooked and served up in a thin, pressed steel wok-like pan. It is served in many restaurants in the United Kingdom. The precise origins of the Balti style of cooking are uncertain; some believe it to have been invented in Birmingham
, while others believe it originated in the Pakistani
region of Baltistan
in Kashmir from where it was brought by South Asian immigrants to Britain.
. Alternatively, 'Balti' food is named after the pot in which it is cooked. That origin of the word is to do with the Urdu
and Hindi
word balty - "Balty, s. Hin. balti, which means "bucket." This is the Port. balde." As mentioned in the late nineteenth century in Hobson-Jobson
, the term 'balti' refers to the steel or iron pot in which the food is cooked or served, taken from the word 'balti', which is derived from the Portuguese word 'balde', meaning bucket/pail, which was taken to India
by the Portuguese on their seafaring enterprises in late fifteenth century. Therefore, originally, the word 'Balti' refers to a bucket
, then evolving to its meaning as a cooking pot.
According to Pat Chapman
, the origins of the word can be traced back to the area of Baltistan
, in northern Pakistan, where the people cook in a cast iron wok similar to the Chinese way of cooking (Baltistan shares a border with China
). In his Curry Club Balti Curry Cookbook, Chapman states: "The balti pan is a round-bottomed, wok-like heavy cast-iron dish with two handles." He also states "The origins of Balti cooking are wide ranging and owe as much to China (with a slight resemblance to the spicy cooking of Szechuan) and Tibet as well as to the ancestry of the Mirpuris, the tastes of the Moghul emperors, the aromatic spices of Kashmir
, and the 'winter foods' of lands high in the mountains."
The word was the subject of analysis on the BBC
TV series Balderdash and Piffle
. A menu from 1982 was cited as the first written reference, with The Curry Club
's Curry Magazine Edition 29, winter 1984 answering a reader query about the definition of Balti. Written evidence seems to be scant prior to 1982, and the Oxford English Dictionary
and The Curry Club
welcome any contributions which will verify the first mention of Balti in Britain.
'). Some balti houses have a sheet of glass on the table top with menus secured underneath. Balti houses often offer very large "Karack" naan bread pieces, meant to be shared by the whole table.
Balti houses originally clustered along and behind the main road between Sparkhill
and Moseley
, to the south of Birmingham city centre. This area (comprising the Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road) is still sometimes referred to as the 'Balti Triangle
' and contains a high concentration of Balti restaurants, as well as some of the oldest to be found in the city. On 28 July 2005, a tornado
caused extensive damage to buildings in the Triangle, forcing many restaurants to close. A clean-up operation ensured most had re-opened by the beginning of 2006.
Balti restaurants have now spread beyond the triangle, and are also based in the south of Birmingham along the Pershore Rd. Lye
near Stourbridge
to the west of Birmingham has become known as the 'Balti Mile' with up to a dozen restaurants clustered along the High Street.
The food and its style of presentation proved very popular during the 1980s and grew in the 1990s; Balti restaurant
s gradually opened up throughout the West Midlands
and then a large part of Britain
. The expanded curry market in Britain is now said to be worth some £4 billion annually; but some still claim that it is impossible to get a 'proper' Balti outside the urban West Midlands
.
Outside Britain, there are a small number of Balti houses in Ireland and many other English-speaking countries, particularly Canada and Australia.
Since the late 1990s, British supermarkets have stocked a growing range of pre-packed Balti meals and the Balti restaurant sector has since faced increasing competition from the retail sector and from changes in customer tastes, along with other traditional Indian restaurants.
Curry
Curry is a generic description used throughout Western culture to describe a variety of dishes from Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Thai or other Southeast Asian cuisines...
cooked and served up in a thin, pressed steel wok-like pan. It is served in many restaurants in the United Kingdom. The precise origins of the Balti style of cooking are uncertain; some believe it to have been invented in Birmingham
Birmingham
Birmingham is a city and metropolitan borough in the West Midlands of England. It is the most populous British city outside the capital London, with a population of 1,036,900 , and lies at the heart of the West Midlands conurbation, the second most populous urban area in the United Kingdom with a...
, while others believe it originated in the Pakistani
Pakistan
Pakistan , officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan is a sovereign state in South Asia. It has a coastline along the Arabian Sea and the Gulf of Oman in the south and is bordered by Afghanistan and Iran in the west, India in the east and China in the far northeast. In the north, Tajikistan...
region of Baltistan
Baltistan
Baltistan , also known as بلتیول བལིུལ་ in the Balti language, is a region in northern Pakistan which forms Gilgit-Baltistan, bordering the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. In addition, a part of Baltistan also falls into Jammu and Kashmir of India. It is situated in the Karakoram mountains...
in Kashmir from where it was brought by South Asian immigrants to Britain.
Origin and Etymology
Balti cuisine became known throughout the UK during the 1990s, after initial growth in Birmingham since the 1980s. One school of thought states that name 'Balti' for food may reflect the fact that an ethnic group living in that area of north Pakistan are called BaltiBalti people
The Balti are an ethnic group of Tibetan descent with some Dardic admixture located in Gilgit-Baltistan, Pakistan and Ladakh, a region in Jammu & Kashmir, India; as well as scattered in Pakistan's major urban centres of Lahore, Karachi and Islamabad/Rawalpindi. The Balti language belongs to the...
. Alternatively, 'Balti' food is named after the pot in which it is cooked. That origin of the word is to do with the Urdu
Urdu
Urdu is a register of the Hindustani language that is identified with Muslims in South Asia. It belongs to the Indo-European family. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan. It is also widely spoken in some regions of India, where it is one of the 22 scheduled languages and an...
and Hindi
Hindi
Standard Hindi, or more precisely Modern Standard Hindi, also known as Manak Hindi , High Hindi, Nagari Hindi, and Literary Hindi, is a standardized and sanskritized register of the Hindustani language derived from the Khariboli dialect of Delhi...
word balty - "Balty, s. Hin. balti, which means "bucket." This is the Port. balde." As mentioned in the late nineteenth century in Hobson-Jobson
Hobson-Jobson
Hobson-Jobson is the short title of Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, a historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and terms from Indian languages which came into use during the...
, the term 'balti' refers to the steel or iron pot in which the food is cooked or served, taken from the word 'balti', which is derived from the Portuguese word 'balde', meaning bucket/pail, which was taken to India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
by the Portuguese on their seafaring enterprises in late fifteenth century. Therefore, originally, the word 'Balti' refers to a bucket
Bucket
A bucket, also called a pail, is typically a watertight, vertical cylinder or truncated cone, with an open top and a flat bottom, usually attached to a semicircular carrying handle called the bail. A pail can have an open top or can have a lid....
, then evolving to its meaning as a cooking pot.
According to Pat Chapman
Pat Chapman
Patrick Lawrence Chapman is an English food writer, broadcaster and author, best known for founding The Curry Club.-Early days:Chapman was born in London during the Blitz...
, the origins of the word can be traced back to the area of Baltistan
Baltistan
Baltistan , also known as بلتیول བལིུལ་ in the Balti language, is a region in northern Pakistan which forms Gilgit-Baltistan, bordering the Xinjiang Autonomous Region of China. In addition, a part of Baltistan also falls into Jammu and Kashmir of India. It is situated in the Karakoram mountains...
, in northern Pakistan, where the people cook in a cast iron wok similar to the Chinese way of cooking (Baltistan shares a border with China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
). In his Curry Club Balti Curry Cookbook, Chapman states: "The balti pan is a round-bottomed, wok-like heavy cast-iron dish with two handles." He also states "The origins of Balti cooking are wide ranging and owe as much to China (with a slight resemblance to the spicy cooking of Szechuan) and Tibet as well as to the ancestry of the Mirpuris, the tastes of the Moghul emperors, the aromatic spices of Kashmir
Kashmir
Kashmir is the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent. Until the mid-19th century, the term Kashmir geographically denoted only the valley between the Great Himalayas and the Pir Panjal mountain range...
, and the 'winter foods' of lands high in the mountains."
The word was the subject of analysis on the BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
TV series Balderdash and Piffle
Balderdash and Piffle
Balderdash and Piffle was a British television programme made by Takeaway Media for the BBC. Presented by Victoria Coren, it was a companion to the Oxford English Dictionary's Wordhunt, in which the writers of the dictionary asked the public for help in finding the origins and first known citations...
. A menu from 1982 was cited as the first written reference, with The Curry Club
The Curry Club
The Curry Club was founded by Pat Chapman in 1982, to further the understanding and appreciation of the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent and now has a membership of several thousand.In 2007 it became known as Pat Chapman’s Curry Club.-Overview:...
's Curry Magazine Edition 29, winter 1984 answering a reader query about the definition of Balti. Written evidence seems to be scant prior to 1982, and the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...
and The Curry Club
The Curry Club
The Curry Club was founded by Pat Chapman in 1982, to further the understanding and appreciation of the cuisines of the Indian subcontinent and now has a membership of several thousand.In 2007 it became known as Pat Chapman’s Curry Club.-Overview:...
welcome any contributions which will verify the first mention of Balti in Britain.
Balti houses
Balti restaurants are often known in Birmingham as 'balti houses' ('house' here meaning not private residences, but, rather, 'establishment,' as in 'customs house' or 'public housePublic house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...
'). Some balti houses have a sheet of glass on the table top with menus secured underneath. Balti houses often offer very large "Karack" naan bread pieces, meant to be shared by the whole table.
Balti houses originally clustered along and behind the main road between Sparkhill
Sparkhill
Sparkhill is an inner-city area of Birmingham, England, situated between Springfield, Hall Green and Sparkbrook.-Etymology:Sparkhill takes its name from Spark Brook, a small stream that flows from Moseley to the River Cole in Small Heath. It was, as the name suggests, a hill that was situated...
and Moseley
Moseley
Moseley is a suburb of Birmingham, England, two miles south of the city centre. The area is a popular cosmopolitan residential location and leisure destination, with a number of bars and restaurants...
, to the south of Birmingham city centre. This area (comprising the Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road) is still sometimes referred to as the 'Balti Triangle
Balti Triangle
The Balti Triangle is an area of Balti houses clustered along Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road, to the south of Birmingham city centre. It covers parts of Sparkbrook, Sparkhill and Balsall Heath....
' and contains a high concentration of Balti restaurants, as well as some of the oldest to be found in the city. On 28 July 2005, a tornado
Birmingham Tornado (UK)
The Birmingham Tornado was one of the strongest tornadoes recorded in the United Kingdom in nearly 30 years, occurring on 28 July 2005 in the suburbs of Birmingham. It formed on a day when strong tornadoes were expected to develop across the Midlands and eastern England...
caused extensive damage to buildings in the Triangle, forcing many restaurants to close. A clean-up operation ensured most had re-opened by the beginning of 2006.
Balti restaurants have now spread beyond the triangle, and are also based in the south of Birmingham along the Pershore Rd. Lye
Lye, West Midlands
Lye is a suburban area of the Black Country in England, between Halesowen and Stourbridge in Dudley Metropolitan Borough, West Midlands. It was formerly a village in the parish of Oldswinford, Worcestershire...
near Stourbridge
Stourbridge
Stourbridge is a town within the Metropolitan Borough of Dudley, in the West Midlands of England. Historically part of Worcestershire, Stourbridge was a centre of glass making, and today includes the suburbs of Amblecote, Lye, Norton, Oldswinford, Pedmore, Wollaston, Wollescote and Wordsley The...
to the west of Birmingham has become known as the 'Balti Mile' with up to a dozen restaurants clustered along the High Street.
The food and its style of presentation proved very popular during the 1980s and grew in the 1990s; Balti restaurant
Restaurant
A restaurant is an establishment which prepares and serves food and drink to customers in return for money. Meals are generally served and eaten on premises, but many restaurants also offer take-out and food delivery services...
s gradually opened up throughout the West Midlands
West Midlands (county)
The West Midlands is a metropolitan county in western central England with a 2009 estimated population of 2,638,700. It came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972, formed from parts of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. The...
and then a large part of Britain
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...
. The expanded curry market in Britain is now said to be worth some £4 billion annually; but some still claim that it is impossible to get a 'proper' Balti outside the urban West Midlands
West Midlands (county)
The West Midlands is a metropolitan county in western central England with a 2009 estimated population of 2,638,700. It came into existence as a metropolitan county in 1974 after the passage of the Local Government Act 1972, formed from parts of Staffordshire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire. The...
.
Outside Britain, there are a small number of Balti houses in Ireland and many other English-speaking countries, particularly Canada and Australia.
Since the late 1990s, British supermarkets have stocked a growing range of pre-packed Balti meals and the Balti restaurant sector has since faced increasing competition from the retail sector and from changes in customer tastes, along with other traditional Indian restaurants.