Balti (food)

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Balti is the name for a style of food probably first devised and served in Birmingham, England. The first written record of the term dates to 1984. [1] A number of restaurants in Birmingham have laid claim to inventing the Balti, but the true story of its origins is difficult to discover. The term was certainly in use in the late-1970s in South Birmingham.

The name Balti food has nothing to do with an ethnic group living in India and Pakistan who are also called Balti. These Balti people are Tibetan Muslims. The food 'Balti' is named after the pot in which it is cooked. Balti food is a Punjabi recipe and prepared mainly in the Punjabi way.

The food is a hot curry-style dish, most likely taking its name from the thick flat-bottomed steel or iron pot in which it is both cooked and served. Normally the balti is served with large naan bread; pieces of which are torn off by hand and used to scoop up the hot curry sauce from the pot. Side dishes and starters usually include onion bhajis, samosas, poppadums and creamy dips.

Balti combines the spices and ingredients of North Indian cuisine with the economics and efficiencies of Chinese cooking.

1 The origin of the word
2 Balti houses
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] The origin of the word

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The exact origin of the word is debated. The following origins are sometimes given:

The term "balti" refers to the steel or iron pot in which the food is cooked or served, taken from the word balti in Hindi and Bengali for a bucket. This is the usual explanation. However, in Hindi, the word balti refers to a bucket not a cooking pot. The term for the metal container in which a balti is served would be, from Urdu, a karahi or karai
Balti gosht (meat) and balti murgh (chicken) are the popular dishes of Potohar and adjoining potohari speaking areas of Mirpur in Pakistan. A large number of expatriates to Britain came from this area of Pakistan and brought Balti cooking to the UK. Karahi Gosht is a similar style of dish popular in Punjab but Balti and Karahi are not the same dishes. The main difference is the use of onions in Balti. In both Rawalpindi and Mirpur Balti is a popular cuisine. However this dish is almost unknown in the central punjab especially Lahore where Karahi is quite popular.
Loyd Grossman, under whose name a line of British curry sauces is marketed, claims on his Balti sauce jar that the term comes from a word for "hubcap," since Indian truckers would cook their Balti in a hubcap.
The Kashmiri term for a karahi or karai is bati. It is possible that this was corrupted, under the influence of the Birmingham accent, into "balti".
The origin of the food would not appear to come from the region of Baltistan or the Balti people who live there; they cook a very different type of Tibetan-influenced food that is based around pasta/noodle dishes. However, Baltistan is a very remote and little-visited mountainous area on the border of Kashmir, and so it is possible that Kashmiris in Britain may have tried to give their newly-invented dish a cover of spurious 'authenticity' - by claiming its origin as being in mysterious Baltistan.

Balti (belonging to baltistan) pronounced as belti with a soft 't' in urdu is a very different word from balti (bucket) pronounced as baalti with a hard 't' in Urdu. Thus the suggestion that the dish came from baltistan may look plausible in English where the spelling are same but not in the native languages of the region. Balti (baalti) means bucket or pot in Urdu and refers to dish cooked in a similar pot.

In the Easter Special edition of the BBC programme Balderdash and Piffle, an earlier 1982 written citation was presented from a community magazine in Birmingham, though it has not as yet been included in the OED. There was also an isolated reference from a restaurant in Newcastle on Tyne in the same year, though all the other early references are from Birmingham.

[edit] Balti houses

Balti restaurants are often known in Birmingham as 'balti houses', although they are not private residences. Balti houses have a reputation as being cheap places to eat. In part, this is because they commonly have no alcohol licence, although customers who wish to drink are welcome to bring their own alcohol with them. The interior of a typical Birmingham balti house was traditionally simple, with the earliest balti houses being remembered as having newspapers used instead of table cloths. Indeed some of the more traditional establishments still have a plastic cover over the tables with the menus secured underneath.[2]

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 possibly Birmingham's highest concentration of Balti restaurants, as well as some of the oldest to be found in the city. Balti Restaurants have now spread beyond the triangle, and Lye near Stourbridge to the west of Birmingham has become known as the 'Balti Mile' with up to 12 restaurants clustered along the High Street at any one time.

The food and its style of presentation proved very popular during the 1980s and grew in the 1990s; Balti restaurants 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 get a 'proper' Balti outside the urban West Midlands. There is even a balti house in Australia, appropriately named the Brum Balti, that plays a non-stop selection of tunes by 1970s Birmingham soft-rock bands such as Electric Light Orchestra and The Moody Blues. A composition titled Balti Utensil appears on the album Hamas Cinema Gaza Strip, by the English experimental electronica artist, Muslimgauze (also known as Bryn Jones).

On 28 July 2005, a tornado [3] caused extensive damage to buildings in the 'Balti Triangle' area of Birmingham, closing many restaurants. A clean-up operation ensured most had reopened by the beginning of 2006.