Christopher Smith in his kitchen Photo: CHRIS SCOTT

Christopher Smith spent his 13th birthday on a ship. The boat, which docked at Tilbury, Essex, on December 17 1964, had sailed from India. ‘My mum gave me a pair of long johns,’ Smith remembers. It was his first sight of England. ‘As we came up the Thames, I saw a frost on the ground. It looked like snow.’

Somewhere in the ship’s hold, buried deep in the family’s luggage, was a notebook filled with recipes, belonging to Dolly, Christopher’s mother. The gold words on its cloth cover read: indu indexed diary. compliments of the india united mills. Inside the feint-lined pages are a record of the family’s Anglo-Indian meals, handwritten in pen and ink. Next to the recipes for rock cakes, lemon curd and cheese straws is a recipe for mysoor pak, a crumbly sweet made with sugar, ghee and nutmeg. After the roly-poly, roast beef and cheese soufflé is a recipe for ‘stick curry’. ‘That was a family favourite,’ Smith says. ‘Like a curry with kebabs in it; meat alternating with ginger and onion on the skewers.’

Mulligatawny soup, ginger pop and instructions for ‘Mrs Reddy’s vegetable curry’ hint more clearly at the Smiths’ former life among India’s post-war Anglo-Indian community; a family who, like the characters in a Paul Scott novel, ‘stayed on’ after independence. ‘Mrs Reddy was the mother of one of the boys in the boarding school where my dad was a teacher,’ Smith says. His paternal grandmother and both his father and mother were born in India, but in 1964 his father took the decision to leave, with his wife and four sons. ‘Dad said we should back out, so we left, and came to live in west London.’

Even before putting a foot on the steps of the Smith family home in Ealing, you can smell spices in the street outside. When Christopher Smith opens the front door, the aroma becomes stronger still. On the gas cooker is a huge pan, three-quarters full of brinjal (aubergine) pickle. Smith has been making it all morning. In 2002 he launched a range of Indian condiments named after his parents, St John and Dolly, using recipes from Dolly’s book.

I had contacted Smith, intrigued, having discovered his brinjal pickle in Trinity Stores, a south London deli. Inside the jar was a rich, non-oily mix of spices, hand-cut aubergines and onions, and no stinting on the chilli. I had also found other wonderful sauces: a chilli sauce that was fiery, but which retained the lovely fruity flavour of scotch bonnet chillies; a piquant sweet pickle made from chopped lime zest; and a cinnamon-tinted, hot apple chutney. The colours of each sauce are startling, the textures perfect. Smith’s pickles outclass the competition.

‘My pickle business arose from an odd coincidence,’ Smith says. His mother died in 1993, then his father in 1998. Smith continued to live in the family house, surrounded by their possessions. In 1999, having given up running a photography shop in Ealing, he was visiting a friend in a kitchen shop in Southall. ‘A woman came in, asking for a chattie for making appam,’ Smith says, explaining that appam are breakfast pancakes and chatties the pans you make them in. ‘I called out, “I know appam, I was born in Bangalore,” and the woman said, “So was I.”

‘When I told her my name, she said, “You’re not Dolly Smith’s son, are you?” It turned out she was the daughter-in-law of my mother’s best friend in India, and she then said, “Your mother made wonderful pickles.”’

Smith vaguely remembered the pickles; after their arrival in England his mother would occasionally make a few jars for school sales. Smith went home and dug out the cloth-covered book. He had promised the friend he had met in the shop that he would have a go at making them, so he did. Another friend of his parents tasted the pickles, and reported that they were just as good as Dolly’s originals. Once word got around, orders came in. Two years later Smith started the business properly. He put the name of his parents on the jars, on impulse, with faded photos of their faces. ‘It was a tribute, to the parents I love and to whom I owe so much.

‘All kids should have a childhood like mine,’ Smith says. St John Smith taught at a boarding school in the Nilgiri Hills in Tamil Nadu. Most of the children at the school were from Indian families and Smith recalls one tale of adventure when not in classes. ‘The railway station near the school had horse-drawn carts; you could rent the ponies for a few pence. We rode them through the hills, playing cowboys and Indians,’ he says with an ironic grin. ‘There were people sitting on the side of the road, selling sweets; when we told them we had no pocket money, they gave them to us.’

Along with trapping quails, digging caves and climbing trees, there was mischief: he tells of how his brother Stan, caught stealing fruit from a man’s garden, was held prisoner in his captor’s shed. ‘The man was sitting outside, with a gun. My father had to come and negotiate his release. The next day the man sent a large amount of fruit to the school. That’s how it was – no malice.’

At home his mother had help in the kitchen and rarely cooked. ‘When we were in India I could count the times I saw either of my parents cooking,’ he says. ‘I was weaned on lentils and rice, and we mostly ate curries. I have loved chillies ever since I ate my first.’ Brought up in a poor country, Smith was taught never to waste. ‘When we ate lunch at my school in England, I would ask other boys if I could eat their fat; I also like marrow, and will still crunch on a chicken bone.’

When the family returned to Britain St John sold everything. ‘He arrived here with £300. He went to the local education authority asking for work, but because he obtained his degree in India they would only allow him to teach juniors.’

On the day of my visit Smith had been up before dawn, buying special aubergines for the brinjal pickle from the Western International Market in Southall. ‘I buy chillies from an east London supplier who has a farm in the Dominican Republic. He chooses the reddest ones for me; they make the sauce look good.’

We decide it is time for lunch, and Smith chooses a favourite curry house, the Rajdoot in Ruislip. Smith loves it here, and brings his own pickles to complement the food. ‘The chef, Zak Rahman, never uses ready-made spice mixes or curry pastes, and makes his own chicken stock,’ he says approvingly, as we plough through a fragrant chicken chilli masala and a side dish of sautéed okra, firing it up nicely with a little of Dolly and St John’s chilli pickle, flavoured with tamarind, ginger, garlic and curry leaves. We dip poppadoms into the juicy lime pickle and mop up a spiced dal with hot flatbreads. Smith could be back in the country of his birth. He has not been there since 1998. ‘I tried to find the house in Bangalore where I was brought up, but it had gone,’ he says wistfully. Part of his upbringing is not lost, however. When Dolly Smith packed her cloth-bound notebook in 1964, she was at least taking memories of her kitchen to her new home.

• St John and Dolly Smith’s pickles: 0797-368 7376; thepickleman.com. Rajdoot, 59 Windmill Hill, Ruislip, west London (01895-634656)

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk / Food and Drink / by Rose Prince / Apr 15th, 2010