Lizzie Collingham
Lizzie Collingham is an independent scholar known for her books on English food culture. Her 2006 book Curry: a tale of cooks and conquerors in particular has been appreciated by critics. She won the Guild of Food Writers Food Book Award 2018 for her book The Hungry Empire.
Early life
Lizzie Collingham was born in England in 1947. She gained her BA at the University of Sussex in 1991, and an MA at the University of York in 1992. She earned her PhD on the "British body in India " at the University of Cambridge in 1997.Career
Collingham began her career teaching history at the University of Warwick. From there she became a junior research fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. She then chose to work independently, remaining as a bye-fellow of Jesus College. She has been a writing fellow for the Royal Literary Fund at the University of East Anglia and has worked in other colleges at the University of Cambridge, including Newnham College. She has served as a specialist lecturer on food for Martin Randall Travel.Reception
''Curry''
Reviewing Curry: a tale of cooks and conquerors for Eclectica, Niranjana Iyer wrote that as an Indian living in the West, he read the book with delight. He notes that the spice most characteristic of Indian cuisine and the British Vindaloo curry was brought by Christopher Columbus from the New World to Spain, and then by Vasco da Gama from Portugal to India. "Vindaloo" itself is, he writes, garbled Portuguese vinho e alhos, "wine and garlic". He notes, too, that chai was invented by the British and then adopted by Indians. His only regret is that there are few vegetarian curries in the book.William Grimes, reviewing Curry for The New York Times, described it as a "fascinating if digressive inquiry", into one of the world's "most internationalized foods". He notes Japan's curry rice karee raisu and Samoa's canned fish and corned beef curry, alongside New York's kosher curries, or the British curried chicken Kiev. Grimes comments that the subject in Collingham's hands is far wider than curry, as it explores Indian cuisine's "often bizarre" cultural exchanges and its global export, stating that "it is a British invention".
Writing in The Guardian, Nicola Barr commented that Collingham counters the view that dishes like (chicken) tikka masala are somehow "less authentic" than some supposedly "pure" dish in India. Barr notes Collingham's analysis, that Indian food "has always been the product of cultural integration, its flavours influenced by colonisation and emigration from the days of the British Raj."