Outside India, Indian cooking is often dismissed in one word - curry - but the real glory and challenge of Indian cooking with its bewildering and very sophisticated different styles, techniques and selection, lies in obtaining the ‘right’ combination of the many spices which go to create the flavour called ‘curry’ and which we of the “Mughal Dynasty” guarantee to dispel forever the myth that all Indian food is a series of monotonous yellow-colour ‘curries’.

Indian cooking has been influenced over the centuries by history, geography and religion. Indian cooking can be roughly divided into north and south (with some deviation along the coastline). In the north, over the centuries, waves of conquerors have come and gone, each leaving their influence on the architecture, the arts, the culture and the food



Sake Dean Mahomed

Diners tucking into beef madras in the country's curry houses tonight may not appreciate their debt to one Sake Dean Mahomed. Almost 200 years before the Indian restaurant became a fixture on the British high street, Mahomed, a Muslim soldier, founded the first curry establishment in Britain, the Hindoostane Coffee House in Portman Square, London. It gave the gentry of Georgian England their first taste of spicy dishes.

Two centuries later, the British are still in love with dishes flavoured with cumin, coriander, ginger, fenugreek, cayenne pepper and caraway. We spend an extraordinary £2.5bn in Indian restaurants every year.