Samosas and Shortbread: An Immigrant Experience in The Great British Bake-Off
The second paper I wrote for my “Eating Culture” Expository Writing class with Professor Janling Fu. You have no idea how many times I rewatched episodes of GBBO (both for this paper, and just for personal pleasure).
With the occasional sheep bleat or bird tweet interspersed in the light-hearted harp instrumentals, a camera pans to the daffodil-dotted fields of Welford Park in Berkshire, England. After a couple of shots of blossoming trees and bees buzzing in flower beds, the camera settles on a white marquee in the center of a field: the home to The Great British Bake-Off.
A 2010 television program in the United Kingdom, The Great British Bake-Off, or GBBO, is one of the most popular food competition shows worldwide, known for joke-cracking hosts and amusing judges, creative baking challenges, and refreshing English pleasantries — from the aesthetic scenery to friendly contestants who often help each other complete their bakes. One such contestant is Great British Bake-Off Season 9’s Rahul Mandal, who is presented as a likeably awkward contestant. However, the show also alludes to his more profound journey as an immigrant from Calcutta, India who came to the U.K. eight years ago for his Ph.D., and, amidst his struggles adjusting to life in London, found a sense of home in making food.
In fact, how nostalgic tastes can be a source of solace for migrants like Rahul is a theme that David E. Sutton’s “Sensory Memory and the Construction of ‘Worlds’” elucidates. Exploring the Greek immigrant experience, Sutton demonstrates how tastes from home can help reaffirm legitimacy in one’s identity. So, with this as a starting point for analysis, we can discover a more profound narrative behind the wholesome humor of the Great British Bake-Off: not only how Rahul renews his connection to home with familiar Indian tastes, but also how he searches for — and achieves — his own equilibrium in his multi-faceted, immigrant identity.
We first meet Rahul in Episode One: the camera begins close on Rahul, a round-faced Indian man with slightly disheveled hair and rectangular glasses, at a wood-topped baking counter. The camera follows closely on his darting gaze as his busy hands off-screen pour ingredients and tug at drawers, while he explains how India has “quite a lot of home-made sweets with coconut and fennel,” so he will utilize both flavors since his “mum really like[s] this biscuit” (“Biscuits Week”). Without another breath, he launches into an explanation of him coming to Loughborough for his Ph.D. – conveying all of this to the judges standing across from the counter: Paul Hollywood, a middle-aged English celebrity baker with salt-and-pepper hair and scruff, and Prue Leith, an older woman with short blonde hair, whose azure glasses pop against the muted background. Throughout Rahul’s monologue, the camera’s reverse shots emphasize their reactions, such as Prue’s amused smile or Paul propping his head up with his elbow on the table to jokingly “get comfortable” to listen more. He even quips, “Well I’m afraid we don’t have any time to talk to anyone else right now.” The fact that the show’s light, cheerful music starts with this banter, followed by a jump-cut back to Rahul’s sheepish smile, seems to reinforce the gentle poking-fun at his endearingly nervous and overtalkative tendencies.
But, is there something more meaningful behind Rahul’s amusing “rambling”? We can perhaps consider it in the context of the inherent link between food and identity as Sutton describes. For example, Sutton notes the omnipresence of basil in kitchens and daily life in Greece, from it being used in breadmaking to it growing on coffeehouse ledges. So, for Greek immigrants to the American West in the 1900s, the scent of basil, which they may even grow themselves as a piece of “home” to keep, would evoke memories of their homeland (Sutton 74). This instance illuminates how senses linked to food can reinforce a connection to what “one has left behind for short or long-term migration”: to family, home and national identity. In fact, we can extrapolate such a concept to GBBO. At first, the former clip may seem like comedic relief in how Rahul “over-explains” his biscuit plans and backstory. However, his use of coconut and fennel, a unique combination used in “home-made sweets” in India, brings to the surface memories of his mother enjoying such flavors, which illuminates Rahul’s deep-rooted ties to unique tastes of India, and thus his grasp on dear memories linked to his identity and family.
For migrants like Rahul displaced from the source of their identity, Sutton explores how else they can overcome isolation and estrangement in new environments. For example, immigrants from Greece, and the island Kalymnos in particular, may often receive from home pestellomata, or food packages, from locally produced honey to baked goods for special holidays (80). And for these immigrants, eating and reexperiencing those nostalgic tastes evoke a feeling of “wholeness” by creating “an imagined community implied in the act of eating food ‘from home.’” (85). In other words, since family at home is lovingly preparing and eating the same food as what is sent in pestellomata, reconnecting with that food can be a source of strength for immigrants to reassert belonging to that home and cultural identity.
In fact, Rahul’s pestellomata during a GBBO challenge takes the form of samosas: a deep-fried, triangle-shaped pastry of savory and often spicy filling, and a popular Indian street food. A scene of him making samosas is pleasantly humorous like Episode One, presenting him as a “mummy’s boy”: emphasized by the close-up on Paul as he asks teasingly, “Has your mum helped you with this one?”, or the close-up on Prue’s laughing grin after Rahul adds that since he had called his mother for advice, she made samosas “last night” and even messaged him pictures of them (“Pastry Week”). Still, if we consider this scene via Sutton’s perspective, we realize that behind these entertaining exchanges about Rahul is something more heartfelt: the significance of samosas as pestellomata to tether Rahul to his mother and thus, his home in India.
But would Rahul’s samosas, and not ones sent from home, still play the same role as pestellomata? One may say it is the consumption of food sent from home that creates an “imagined community.” However, Sutton also observes the significance of the origins of food in pestellomata: its contents are often baked or “actually produced” by family. For one Greek immigrant in London in particular, she recalls the “olive oil that her father makes from family trees,” and how he would knock olives off trees “in a certain direction” and raise them “only on rainwater” (80). In other words, knowledge of how the food is made is vital to the meaning of the food itself. So, while Rahul does not eat samosas sent from home, Rahul’s mother’s lovingly conveyed recipe, manifested in Rahul’s iteration of her coriander, paneer cheese, and potato samosas, is his pestellomata. By exchanging wisdom about samosas and making them “alongside” his mother, he can rediscover tastes from home and renew his Indian identity.
But, just like how familiar tastes can evoke “home,” unfamiliar tastes can isolate, a point of contrast Sutton does not note. For instance, Rahul has never eaten a donut before Episode Ten, so he mentions he will use buttercream — an unconventional choice — to decorate his donuts. The immediate jump-cut to Paul’s expression as his mouth twitches and he dubiously questions, “Buttercream?”, along with a succession of tense music beats, heightens the nervous atmosphere and almost implies that Rahul should know about Western donut norms (“Final”). An ensuing jump-cut to Rahul’s face as he sighs in worry, and to his unsure, fluttering hands in flour on the counter further underscores his struggle in his search for balance, forging bakes without childhood knowledge of English culture in the context of an English baking show.
Indeed, the reality is that besides samosas, GBBO does not have explicitly Indian dishes as its challenges, which can almost be an analogy of how Rahul has had to adjust to life in the U.K. So, it seems unsustainable to only rely on the concept of isolated “wholes” based solely in food from home to “survive” in new environments (Sutton 75). Thus, for such displaced people, food and its stories are not only a way to reaffirm an established identity linked to home, but also a potential channel by which one can forge a new sense of belonging and identity.
The consequences of this manifest in Rahul’s convergence of Indian flavors and English baking. For instance, Rahul actually “fuses” his Indian flavors, fennel and coconut, into a traditional Scottish shortbread biscuit in his Fennel and Coconut Pitcaithly Bannock (“Biscuits Week”). Moreover, as he prepares his Bonfire Night Caramel Ginger Cake in Episode Five, Rahul recounts how his mother was “quite surprised” he was using ginger, since Indian cuisine traditionally adds ginger to savory dishes like curry (“Spice Week”). That is to say, while ginger is a flavor of his original conception of Indian cuisine, Rahul now claims a revised perspective on ginger, signaling an added nuance to his identity as an immigrant integrating into a new culture. That is another dimension to food experience Sutton does not address: even with one’s deep-rooted sensory memories linked to a core identity, food memories are not static, just as how immigrants can negotiate a new sense of self that integrates both their old and new cultures.
We can see a culmination of such a journey for Rahul to find his niche in English society, in a clip from the Final Episode with his friends David and Liz, a middle-aged English couple. Soft, tentative piano music begins and sunlight streams in on Rahul on the left, David and Liz on the right side of their kitchen table: Rahul, in a simple white shirt; David, a blue-red plaid button-up; and Liz, a lime-green blouse. With all of them centered and conversing around a meal, with orange-decorated porcelain bowls and silverware, this warm and soothing scene conveys a sense of family. And in fact, we later learn from interview shots of Liz that she and David were the ones who encouraged Rahul to start English baking to ease his transition to the U.K.. Thus, this clip underscores how Rahul had accepted into his identity this newer association of English cuisine and an English family, both gradually flourishing and reinforcing each other. In parallel, the balanced framing of the final shot, where Rahul takes up the right half of the frame and a laptop with his parents’ video chat is on the left half, almost mirrors the initial kitchen table shot with David and Liz: as if to say that Rahul, while he misses family, has found solace in the U.K — with English baking, with his friends — in which he can find a home.
Behind the pastel scenery and cheesy jokes that convey the light-hearted atmosphere of The Great British Bake-Off is a deeper significance to the bakes into which contestants pour their diligence and passion. In particular, with David Sutton’s perspective as a lens, we can note how tastes – and their stories – from home can renew connection to one’s core identity for migrants like Rahul. And in fact, Rahul is also able to integrate those influences into his English-style bakes, from lamb curry pie to Bengali five-spice Chelsea buns — and wins Season 9 of the Great British Bake-Off. Since GBBO focuses on English baking, one might say that he had no choice in fusing Indian with English flavors. Nonetheless, as his friend David mentions, that Rahul has, of his own passion and agency, achieved “a level where he’s one of the top three amateur bakers in the country” — and later wins — “is phenomenal” (“Final”). It is a testament to the equilibrium he has sought and found between his Indian identity and his newfound English one: of tastes and aesthetics undeniably “from home,” presented in the lens of English cuisine.
Rahul’s story arc is heartening as part of the upward trend in Western culture in valuing immigrant stories as integral to a society’s cumulative experience. Like how Rahul does not only default to Indian flavor nor bakes purely English style, these stories reaffirm that an immigrant’s identity is not necessarily binary: neither rejection nor assimilation to a new culture. Thus, we can increasingly recognize such complex identities of those forging a balance between cultures in themselves: such as, perhaps, that of an immigrant living in London as a nuclear scientist, who carries a hint of an Indian accent in otherwise impeccable British English — and, of course, a penchant for both samosas and shortbread.
Works Cited
“Biscuits Week.” The Great British Baking Show, collection 6, episode 1, Channel 4, 28 Aug. 2018. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81001554.
“Final.” The Great British Baking Show, collection 6, episode 10, Channel 4, 30 Oct. 2018. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81001563.
“Pastry Week.” The Great British Baking Show, collection 6, episode 6, Channel 4, 2 Oct. 2018. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81001559.
“Pitcaithly Bannock.” Dictionary of the Scots Language, Scottish Language Dictionaries, 2004, www.dsl.ac.uk/entry/snd/pitcaithly_bannock.
“Spice Week.” The Great British Baking Show, collection 6, episode 5, Channel 4, 26 Sep. 2018. Netflix, https://www.netflix.com/watch/81001559.
Sutton, David E. “Sensory Memory and the Construction of ‘Worlds.’” Remembrance of Repasts: An Anthropology of Food and Memory, Berg, 2001, pp. 73–102.
Vincent, Alice. “Welcome to Welford Park: the Stunning Berkshire Location Where The Great British Bake Off Is Filmed.” The Telegraph, Telegraph Media Group, 1 Oct. 2019, www.telegraph.co.uk/tv/0/where-great-british-bake-off-filmed-welford-park-location-berkshire/.
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