An unexpectedly Florentine story

The postwar British dish that is still on trattoria menus

Last week I did a lecture at the British Institute of Florence on the connections between Britain and Florence that I have come across over many years of researching the history of Florentine food. They will surprise you. You may have to wait for the video to be uploaded onto Youtube (hopefully this week) to hear the whole thing but I thought I’d tell you about one of the dishes that I particularly enjoyed researching.

I have personally always been curious about the intersection between immigrants and the city that they choose to live in as I have spent thirty years living in a country other than my own, including nearly 17 of those in Florence. During the second half of the nineteenth century (an important period for Florentine food, one of the most important Italian cookbooks was written in Florence during this time) one-third of Florence’s population of 200,000 was foreign and 30,000 of these alone were anglophones. There has to be some kind of imprint left behind — and this is what got me digging.

But I did not expect to dig so deeply into curry. After all, it doesn’t seem like either a Florentine or a British dish — but there is a connection to both here and it took a little trip down memory lane to a birthday meal many years ago with my best friend at Trattoria Cammillo for this one to surface into a story. And a Florentine story it is.

For the record, curry is an extremely ancient South Asian preparation and has been known in India since at least 2000 BC. But curry powder, in the form of a blend of spices, first made its way to Britain from India in the 18th century via the British colonial government and it is first described in an English cookbook from 1747 by Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy:

Curry powder became commercially available from the end of that century. This is something that makes British Indian Curry different from one in India, where rather than use a ready made blend of ground spices, Indian cooks would traditionally prepare their own curry pastes and blends using whole spices.

Curry was first served in coffee houses in Britain from the early 1800s and grew enormously popular: there was a curry house in nearly every town and even Queen Victoria was a fan. One 1852 cookbook states “few dinners are thought complete unless one is on the table.” It became a national dish. But its popularity really shot up during and after the Second World War, when bombed-out cafes were bought cheaply and curries, adapted to British tastes, could be found alongside fish and chips and pies.

Postwar is around the same time you begin to find it in Florence, too, when it was a highly requested dish from British visitors and expats.

Harry's Bar opened in Florence in December 1953 in via del Parione, moving to their nearby, current Lungarno location in 1963. Highly fashionable, it was a mecca for visiting movie stars and celebrities — the likes of Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, Greta Garbo, Paul Newman and Franco Zefirelli have all been here. One of the dishes you can still find on their iconic menu, that I enjoyed recently at Harry’s Bar in the Garden of Sina Villa Medici is their prawn curry. You can choose between chicken or prawns and it is served with rice pilaf and a sweet, jammy mango chutney on the side.

This curry is very mild and delicately spiced but richly creamy. The chicken or prawns are dusted in flour and fried in oil, you add a splash of cognac, pure cream and the 'curry sauce' which is made with onion, green apple, curry powder, a splash of white wine and another of cognac and vegetable stock, cooked down for an hour and then blended until smooth.

This isn’t the only place in Florence that counts chicken curry as one of the unchanging dishes on its menu. There is also Trattoria Cammillo in Borgo San Jacopo, a Florentine institution. It has that air about it, like Harry's, of an unchanged, classic atmosphere. Their curry, I was told, years ago at that birthday lunch when I asked the waiter what I should try, is their signature dish. But I waved it aside at the time — thinking stupidly, how un-Florentine — and went with a fresh pasta (also one of their specialties) with porcini mushrooms.

But while thinking about this lecture, that curry came back to me and I really wanted to know more. I phoned the owner Chiara Masiero, whose namesake grandfather Cammillo founded the restaurant in 1944 (it was destroyed the following year when bridges and parts of Florence including Borgo San Jacopo were bombed, and they moved down the road to where the restaurant is now) and she recounted to me the evolution of this curry in their restaurant.

Harry's Bar, not far away on the other side of the river, was very popular with British expats and visitors alike, attracting a certain type of clientele. At that time, in 1950s Florence the oltrarno was not very built up, it was seen as a less refined, an artisan’s quarter. Yet the position of Cammillo is really very close to the Ponte Santa Trinita, it's only a hop, skip and a jump to where Harry's was.

Chiara's father, who was Bolognese (a fact that she thinks made him stand out in Florence) sapeva fare, she says — he knew how to charm clients, he was full of initiatives, they were doing really well. He soon added another room onto the restaurant, people loved it and word of mouth led to more customers venturing across the bridge to eat at Cammillo — including some of the British customers of Harry's Bar. They would come and, interestingly, they would request Harry’s creamy chicken curry with pilaf and mango chutney. It became a fixture on the Cammillo menu in the 1950s and still is.

I have a 30 year old restaurant guide of Florence and the entry for Cammillo with their menu mentions their scampi al curry con riso. It is of course similar to the Harry's Bar dish, also served with toasted rice and mango chutney. The curry powder mix they use is a secret blend and the mango chutney is Chiara's own recipe, invented in the 1980s, she tells me, when she could no longer find this imported chutney that they were using and she had to make her own, inspired by the ingredients list on the back of her last jar of imported chutney.

I find this wonderful – and although some (like I mistakenly did) may scoff at the idea of eating (a very untraditional, British version of) chicken or prawn curry in a traditional Florentine trattoria or a classic spot like Harry's, this dish has its own story and it's really a very Florentine story.