the birthplace of the balti was birmingham
The Balti Triangle is an area of
Balti houses clustered along Ladypool Road, Stoney Lane and Stratford Road, to the south of
Birmingham city centre. It covers parts of
Sparkbrook,
Sparkhill and
Balsall Heath.
This area probably contains Birmingham's highest concentration of balti restaurants, as well as some of the oldest to be found in Britain. Birmingham is popularly believed to be the birthplace of the Balti curry [1]
Balti cuisine became known throughout the UK during the 1990s, after initial growth in Birmingham since the 1980s. One school of thought states that name 'Balti' for food may reflect the fact that an ethnic group living in the Baltistan region of northern Pakistan are called
Balti.
Alternatively, 'Balti' food is named after the pot in which it is cooked. That origin of the word is to do with the
Urdu and
Hindi word
Balty, which means "bucket."[2] As mentioned in the late nineteenth century in
Hobson-Jobson, the term 'balti' refers to the steel or iron pot in which the food is cooked or served, taken from the word 'balti', which is derived from the Portuguese word 'balde', meaning bucket/pail, which was taken to the
Indian subcontinent by the Portuguese on their seafaring enterprises in late fifteenth century. Therefore, originally, the word 'Balti' refers to a
bucket, then evolving to its meaning as a cooking pot.