For 45-year-old Adrian McCluskie, Christmas has never been about spectacle. It arrives through preparation — a rhythm that begins days in advance. As part of a longer Anglo-Indian migration story that has unfolded across decades, he moved to Perth, Australia, from Mumbai in 2003. Yet, every December, his kitchen fills with a familiar smell — vinegary, clove-heavy, unmistakably meaty — one that pulls him back to his childhood in Malad, and to Christmases that were shaped more by ritual than noise.
“Christmas meant salted beef tongue,” he says, without hesitation. “It was the highlight of the season”. In his family, the tongue was thinly sliced and eaten cold; paired with bread and butter, sometimes a dab of mustard. It was offered carefully to guests who did not recoil at the idea of eating beef tongue, and packed up for relatives who were counting on it. Before his parents dressed up and headed out for the Christmas dance — a staple of Anglo-Indian social life in the decades after Independence — beef tongue anchored the evening.
Preparing it was his father’s domain. He began making salted meat in the 1960s, gradually moving on to tongue, a cut that demanded patience, discipline and time. The recipe, his father always said, came from his grandmother, which made sense in an era when curing and preserving were practical skills rather than culinary affectations.
Beef tongue
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The process was exacting. The tongue had to be fresh, never previously chilled. During marination, no water could touch it; it was wiped carefully with a cloth instead. Excess fat was trimmed away, holes were pierced with a skewer, and cloves pushed in. The tongue was placed in an earthenware or enamel bowl and covered almost completely with a boiled mixture of vinegar, saltpetre and crude sugar. Lime juice was squeezed over the top, the spent skins turned inside out and laid over the meat like a seal.
Each day, it was pierced again with the same two-pronged fork — a tool reserved solely for this purpose. After four days — five at most — the tongue was boiled with beetroot for colour, peeled, returned briefly to the pot until tender, then drained, cooled, wrapped in foil and refrigerated. It was best eaten cold, and slowly.
Adrian still prepares salted tongue in Perth, though less often now. Fresh tongues are harder to source, and work has a way of compressing time. Still, when he does make it, the ritual holds. After his father passed away, his brother inherited the two-pronged fork. “That felt right,” he says. “Some things carry memory better than recipes.”
That restraint is woven deeply into Anglo-Indian food itself, a cuisine shaped not by region but by circumstance. Unlike other Indian Christian communities — where Christmas tables are defined by dishes such as Goan sorpotel, Mangalorean dukra maas or Keralite achappam — Anglo-Indian cooking emerged from the intersection of British meal structures and Indian techniques. It was a cuisine formed in workplaces and institutions, particularly the railway colonies, where proximity and routine shaped both daily life and celebration.
Pickled pork vindaloo
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From the 19th Century onwards, the railways were among the most significant employers of Anglo-Indians. Colonies were not merely clusters of housing but complete social ecosystems, with schools, clubs, churches and messes. Jamalpur, home to the East Indian Railway locomotive workshop opened in 1862, became the blueprint: regimented layouts, bungalow lines, community halls and lives organised around shift-work and timetables. Perambur in Madras followed a similar pattern with its Loco and Carriage Works, alongside hubs such as Howrah and Kanchrapara in West Bengal.
Food followed function. Dishes had to stretch, feed many mouths, and sit patiently through long hours. Over time, that density thinned. Migration, urbanisation and the gradual break-up of extended households altered how — and where — Anglo-Indian food was cooked. The 2011 Census of India, which recorded just 296 people under the “Anglo-Indian” category, later became a flashpoint, cited in parliamentary debates and used to justify the withdrawal of nominated Anglo-Indian seats under the 104th Constitutional Amendment. Within the community, the figure is widely regarded as a severe undercount. What Census data struggled to capture, however, had already retreated into private spaces — into kitchens, recipes and memory.
A different time
In places like Kolar Gold Fields, a mining town roughly 100 kilometres from Bengaluru, that sense of communal life once ran deep. Often described as “Little England”, KGF had clubs, schools, choirs and kitchens that formed a tightly knit, multi-ethnic society. Christmas there was not a single meal but a sequence, unfolding across days.
Food historian Bridget White-Kumar, who grew up in KGF and has authored seven books on Anglo-Indian cuisine, remembers Christmas as an all-hands affair. “Everyone joined in,” she says. “The aunts, the cousins, the older girls — we all helped my grandmother prepare the turkey roast with stuffing.” Alongside it, there would be chicken fry or roast, but never rice. “Rice simply didn’t feature at Christmas dinner,” she recalls.
Almorth
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Bridget spotlights a forgotten Anglo-Indian Christmas staple, almorth, also known as buffarth — a mixed meat stew made with beef, pork, chicken and vegetables, eaten with bread or rolls. “It was cooked to last,” she explains. “We’d often eat it after midnight mass, or again at breakfast the next morning.” Christmas breakfast itself was generous by any measure: “Eggs, bacon, sausages — a full English spread before the day had properly begun.”
That kind of abundance, she notes, is increasingly rare. “Today, most Anglo-Indian Christmas tables have narrowed to a roast, a vindaloo and some pulao,” she says. The reasons, she adds, are familiar: “People are busy, families are smaller, and many don’t really know their own food heritage anymore.”
Chennai-based writer-director Harry Maclure, founder ofAnglo-Ink Books (India’s first Anglo-Indian publishing company) and editor of the magazine, Anglos In the Wind that examines issues of the diaspora, recalls a time when a far broader repertoire circulated through Anglo-Indian homes and magazines. Alongside almorth were dishes such as pickled pork vindaloo, slow-cooked in vinegar and mustard oil, and padre duck roast, simmered in coconut milk with spices, sugar and arrack before being finished with fried potatoes. These labour-intensive dishes, rooted in European techniques and adapted to Indian climates, were meant to be shared. He also remembers a winter speciality once common in North India: bone marrow soup, now rarely made.
Mince rice
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For Cedric Hawthorne, 62, who grew up in Delhi after his parents moved from Bilaspur in present-day Chhattisgarh, Christmas arrived quietly, too. In the 1970s and 80s, Delhi winters were colder and damper, and houses rarely warmed through. In the days leading up to Christmas, his mother prepared what the family called bone pepper water or marrow bone soup, made with beef, simmering beef bones with vegetables, garlic and black pepper for hours. Served in mugs when people returned home chilled, it marked the moment when Christmas truly began. Cedric still makes the concoction but has swapped out beef for mutton.
That sense of continuity carries into the present through people like Karen Myers, a Bengaluru-based PR and communications specialist. For her, cooking is both inheritance and intent. One dish she returns to is mince rice, a keema pulao that began as improvisation when excess mince was folded into rice with carrots and beans. It became tradition. Her family history — a Scottish grandfather, a grandmother who was English and Anglo-Burmese, with earlier roots in Kerala — explains the layering. What her grandmother once casually called “noodles and curry” is now recognisable as a house-style adaptation of khow suey, the Burmese coconut noodle curry that travelled into Indian kitchens through Anglo-Burmese communities. It appears on her Christmas table only occasionally, usually when the weather turns cold, but when it does, it captures the essence of Anglo-Indian food: adaptable, comforting and shaped by movement.
Bone marrow soup
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That adaptability is perhaps best captured in the archive of Jenny Mallin, whose book A Grandmother’s Legacy, which was published in 2015, traces five generations of Anglo-Indian women through handwritten recipes. Her great-great-great grandmother Wilhelmina, born in Vellore in 1828, recorded a Christmas cake recipe in 1865 that required fruit to be dried in the sun. By the time Jenny’s grandmother Irene Jefferies (née Shandley), born in 1899 in Madras, was baking, the recipe called for 150 egg yolks, a marker of scale, labour and communal celebration. Irene’s notes also record change — Sun-Maid raisins could now be bought ready to use.
Jenny still bakes the cake today, but with five eggs instead of 150. The reduction is practical, inevitable. What remains unchanged is the lineage — a reminder that Anglo-Indian food traditions survive not by remaining fixed, but by adjusting carefully to time, place and circumstance.