THE FLAVOURS were strange. So were the staff and my fellow lunchers. Before I made my first visit to Veeraswamy’s, the old Indian restaurant off London’s Piccadilly, I had often walked past it, hand in hand with my mother and admired the smart uniform, turbaned and tasselled, of the doorman who guarded the unobtrusive entrance. He reminded me of the box of lead toy soldiers – Bengal Lancers I think they were – which, before I was eight years old, gave me an image of the grandeur of the Raj and the splendours of the Indian Army. Eventually, when my mother yielded to my importunities and took me inside, I saw for myself what the Raj was like and what, 10 years after independence, the old army had become. The clientele consisted mainly of ageing, balding, gently fattening Englishmen with toothbrush moustaches retrieving the sensations of India at separate tables, remembering what it was like to be a minor sahib in the military or the administration. They savoured their tiffin and spooned chutneys, grated coconuts and sliced bananas from the sinuous, silvery epergnes that raised their arms, like voluptuous houris, in the centre of each starched tablecloth. While my little nose twitched at the unfamiliar scents that rose from the curries, the old officers maintained unflinching discipline, unseduced by spices, impassive at their pungency.

     Meanwhile, as I later learned, in India and Pakistan the denizens of officers’ messes – all by now natives, of course – were stolidly chewing through roast lamb with mint sauce and bottled peas out of reverence for even the most unpalatable traditions of their corps. Food is funny. It is at once the most conservative form of culture and – in some circumstances – the most permeable to alien influences. Veeraswamy’s is still there, in the curved alley that winds into Regent Street, but it is changed now. The decor, uniformly off-white in my day, is now as glitzy and shimmering as Sennacherib’s cohorts. The staff have shed their turbans, tunics and deferential mien. They now include sharply suited, unobsequious men and glamorous young women. The food is inventive and calculated to surprise. Among the lunchers, wealthy Indian families predominate. Riches have succeeded Raj.

     I have always thought food was the most instructive kind of historical document. You can calibrate cultures with a kitchen measuring spoon. No problem occupies more historical scholarship nowadays than that of the relative input of different cultures to a globalising world – in particular, the comparative contributions of “East” and “West” to each other as cultural exchange shifts back and forth across the globe. Historians quarrel about when and how and in what respects the rising “West” overtook the declining “East” in technology, science, ideas and sheer power, and how far the process has already begun to go into reverse. If we focus on food, we can see the ebb and flow of influences with some clarity.

     In what we conventionally think of as the Middle Ages, when Latin Christendom looked to Islam for lessons in science and standards in taste, the arts of Islam shaped tabletops and informed recipes at Western courts. The aesthetics of food resembled those of the sacred arts, with a bias towards goldsmithery and jewellery work, which the best cooks emulated. They used saffron for gilding, sugar like diamonds, and meat, sliced alternately white and dark, “like gold and silver coin”, as the 10th-century cookbook The Baghdad Cook said. They made dishes to imitate carnelians and pearls. Just as Christians heavily censed sacred spaces and altars, so heavy aromas perfumed royal banqueting halls and tables. Sweet flavours and scented ingredients commanded most esteem. Cooks sought almond milk, ground almonds, rose water and extracts of other perfumed flowers, sugar and the spices of the East, to which Islam had privileged access by comparison with Christendom.

     Almonds appear in sauces for all the sweet Egyptian stews that Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi described in 13th-century treatise the Kitab al-Tabih. Fowl, he recommended, should be boiled in rose water on a bed of crushed hazelnuts or pistachios, with purslane and poppy seeds, or rose hips, cooked until they coagulated, then enlivened at the last minute with precious spices, because to cook those for an extended period would diminish their flavour. A typical banquet, wrote al-Baghdadi, should include three roasted lambs stuffed with chopped meats fried in sesame oil, with crushed pistachios, pepper, ginger, cloves, mastic, coriander, cardamom and other spices sprinkled with musk-infused rose water. Between and around the lambs the attentive cook should scatter 50 fowl and 50 small birds stuffed with eggs or meat and fried with the juice of grapes or lemons. Pastry, sprinkled with rose water and baked until rose red, should envelop the whole.

     Aristocratic tables in the West retained some tastes inherited from antiquity and, of course, local and regional traditions, but the effect of Muslim magnetism is evident in the balance of ingredients suggested, for instance, in a menu from Richard II’s England. Pig’s umbles, boiled in stock with leeks, onions, blood, vinegar, pepper and cloves, was a dish that would have done an ancient Roman table justice. The rest of the meal, however, was fit for a sultan: small birds boiled in almond paste with cinnamon and cloves; rose-scented rice boiled soft in almond milk, mixed with chickens’ brawn, cinnamon, cloves and mace and scented with sandalwood. Dishes prominent in late medieval Western cookery books regularly betray Muslim influence with these unmistakeable signs, or with the inclusion of telltale ingredients such as pomegranate seeds, raisin paste or sumac berries sweetened with almonds.

     The Renaissance interrupted the era of Western indebtedness to Eastern food by urging court cooks back to supposedly classical recipes. From the 16th century to the 18th, global ecological exchange and long-range trade transformed the food of many parts of the world, taking New World ingredients to Europe and Asia. The impact on Eastern eating was immense. No one can imagine the food of Sichuan or Thailand without fierce American chillies, or satay without peanuts, which are indigenous to Brazil. But the penetration of Western markets by Eastern ingredients was at least as conspicuous a feature of the period. New World plantations made rice more easily and widely available than ever before, while sugar – previously a luxury in Europe – became a cheap sweetener for the masses. Tea (Chinese) and coffee (Arabian) followed a similar trajectory, adopted as the counter-opiates of the labour force of the industrialising West.

     Western imperialism dominated the succeeding era; but although the balance of power favoured Westerners in the 19th-century world, their Eastern victims, subjects and collaborators influenced their culinary tastes far more than the other way round. In part this was because members of Western elites and even, sometimes, hoi polloi who saw the East on military or naval service adapted to unfamiliar food. In part, it was the consequence of migrations of labour, coerced or bought, to Western imperial frontiers and heartlands. Coolies from India had a big impact on the food of parts of the Caribbean. Workers from China were probably responsible for the creation or adumbration of chop suey and chow mein in the United States. In South Africa the even earlier importation of Malay workers, some from Java, in the 1650s created a distinctive cuisine now called Cape Malay. In Peru the Nikkei style of cooking took shape among Japanese migrant workers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Worldwide, the cases fall into two categories: dishes transferred westwards without radical modification and dishes contrived in vague imitation of the Orient.

     Britain is particularly rich in the latter. Chicken tikka masala is the locus classicus, former foreign secretary Robin Cook declaring it “a truly British national dish”. In 2009 Mohammad Sarwar, then Labour MP for Glasgow Central, campaigned for the city to be assigned European Union Protected Designation of Origin status for the curry.

     The idea, however, of combining tandoor-baked chicken with cream and tomatoes (another plant of New World origin) must have arisen in a colonial context. Most authorities trace it to Indian restaurants in London in the 1950s. It is now reputedly the most popular restaurant dish in Britain, displacing roast beef and fish and chips.

     Vindaloo, a fierce form of curry, seems to have a similar colonial history. The name is probably a corruption of the Portuguese vinho de alho, or garlic wine, which in Portugal is a typical marinade for diced meat. Now the English think of it as viscerally English – so much so that for the 1998 World Cup the pop band Fat Les used it to sum up the essence of England in a footballing anthem:

 

     We all like vindaloo,

     We’re England,

     We’re gonna score one more than you.

 

Balti cooking – quick currying in a shallow, heavy-bottomed pan – is now big business in Britain. Remote origins are traceable to India and perhaps, according to some analysts, to China. But it seems to be truly indigenous only to Birmingham and to have been unknown before the 1980s.

     The Dutch equivalent of chicken tikka masala is rijsttafel. In Somerset Maugham’s short story The Vessel of Wrath, Dutch commissioner Mynheer Evert Gruyter eats it every day without tiring of it – unsurprisingly, perhaps, given that scores of side dishes can accompany the rice, which is the staple ingredient. The Netherlands has its own native national dish, the hutspot of stewed root vegetables that commemorates the humble food that sustained the defenders during the Spanish siege of Leiden in 1574. But rijsttafel, which is eaten more frequently and more enthusiastically, has replaced it as the country’s honorary dish even more completely than vindaloo has replaced the roast beef of Old England. Rijsttafel is exotic where hutspot is domestic, celebratory rather than commemorative, lavish rather than austere and variegated rather than limited. Chafing dishes around a central rice bowl keep garnishes hot. Sambal goreng is obligatory: chilli, spices, onions and garlic are fried to make a sauce in which to bathe meat or fish. Other sambals appear, usually mixing chillies with citrus zest or shrimp paste. Rendang is the essential curried ingredient. The Dutch usually make it with beef, though the classic version demands buffalo meat, marinated in coconut milk with the native spices of Sumatra – turmeric, ginger, galangal, garlic, salam leaf – and the chillies of the colonial era. It conquered Dutch naval and colonial personnel in the East in the 19th century and penetrated the Netherlands with the domestic staff that some of them took home. In The Hague, the Garoeda Restaurant started serving it in 1949, just as Indonesia was fighting off the Dutch Empire and the city began its widowhood with the loss of the former colonies.

     Occasional adaptations of Western cooking styles in the East include tempura in Japan – though no Portuguese fry-up was ever so delicate – and baguettes in Vietnam and Cambodia. Vietnamese banh mi is as likely to be stuffed with pâté or mayonnaise as with Chinese-style pickled vegetables. Today, Japanese cooks do things with beef that no Texan or Argentine ever thought of.

     Western colonialism in the East, however, seems almost never to have transformed subject people’s tastes, but those of the intruders only. The Philippines is the great exception, where more than 300 years of Spanish presence – which no other Western empire could match for endurance – did have an effect. By the time the Spaniards reached the Philippines they had learned a thing or two about colonialism. Missionary policy ensured that indigenous languages would be inviolate, whereas of the other two bedrock features of culture – religion and food – the first would undergo total subversion in a spiritual conquest that was remarkably successful on most of the islands, and the second would be a hybrid. The hybrid is complex today because Chinese colonisation, which – despite periodic massacres, expulsions and exclusions – was vital to the economy, contributed as much as that of the Spaniards, while settlers have never compromised the Malay foundations of Philippine cuisine. Fluffy rice, often flavoured with banana leaves, is the basis of almost every dish, but bread usually appears alongside it in perpetuation of the Spanish legacy. Some Filipino bread has the flavour of coconut, which, in one form or another, features in most meals and supplies the universal cooking oil.

     The Spanish legacy also affects the lexicon of the kitchen. Prawns, for instance, are gambas, while aromatic stews are adobos (or, in the Malay corruption, adobong) and sweet pancakes are turrón (which in the Spanish of Spain signifies almond sweetmeats). Some lightly adapted Spanish dishes are prominent in the popular repertoire, including paella, caldereta, made with kid, and suckling pig roasted in the Castilian manner and called lechón. In the sweet course that ends a typical Filipino meal everything is of Spanish origin: crème caramel or flan (the only Spanish pudding to have a place on the global menu), marzipan cakes and other confections of egg yolks and sugar.

     When the tides of empire ebb, returnees and counter-colonists travel with them. So Britain has become, in the post-colonial era, a springboard for the worldwide projection of Indian food. The Netherlands has played a similar role for Malay dishes and France for those of the Maghrib and Vietnam. In the same period, globalisation, long-range mass tourism and worldwide migrations have demonstrated that the West is highly receptive to exotic innovation, while beyond the Middle East, the peoples of the eastern and southern extremities of Asia are far harder to wean onto alien cuisines.

     McDonald’s and Starbucks buck this trend – though one doubts whether their popularity has much to do with their food. Their customers in India, Japan and China seem rather to be choosing a “lifestyle option”. In the West, by contrast, even the most introspective food cultures – those of France, Spain and Italy – have failed to resist the intrusion of cuisines with which they have few or no imperial links, such as those of Lebanon, Thailand, Japan and Turkey, from where the kebab has become a global rival to the burger and the burrito. Western food has registered no comparable counter-coups – apart, arguably, from the Irish pub, which seems to be a concept with an infinitely elastic range – although I hear there is a Bauernstube in Beijing and one of the best views of Tokyo is to be had from The Peak Lounge at the Park Hyatt Hotel, which bills itself, rather unconvincingly, as an English tea lounge.

      One of the surprising effects of counter-colonialism is the current proliferation of Afghan restaurants in the United States; do the outlets for qabeli palaw or mantu in Wisconsin outnumber those for hamburgers or hot dogs in Helmand? If the history of food is anything to go by the world seems to be reverting to normal. After a brief period of Western supremacy, the direction of cultural exchange is again preponderantly from East to West. That is how the world has worked for most of history. Western civilisation, as John Hobhouse has told us, has “eastern origins”. Until the 17th century, at least, as Joseph Needham demonstrated, the West took its technology and some of its scientific ideas from China, with Southeast, South and Southwest Asia helping with mediation. The oriental restaurateurs who are conquering Western palates are exercising a benign form of imperialism, with highly respectable precedents.