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desperanceGod, I love doing this. Where I've been happily working away up here (it's been a good working day - at last! - and I was thinking about posting re that, but I've been distracted by this) and then was reminded by fussing cat that it was probably time I started thinking about our dinners, so I went downstairs, turned on the radio and set to work on a mutton curry. Something of this, something of that; a glance at a recipe, but nah, don't think I'll do that, let's try this instead; chop chop, sizzle sizzle, stir stir; suddenly noticed deeply agitated cat at my feet, checked the time and it was in fact an hour later, and His Tea was Late!!
So the curry is simmering itself into fiery tenderness, the rice is boiled and ready to pulao (sheesh, that looks so Chinese, y'know? There are of course five-and-twenty ways of constructing transliterated spellings, but maybe I'd better say pilau, to retain a sense of national clarity), the cat is fat and slumpy and I am back at work. Tippy-tappy-typey, with regular excursions downstairs to stir the curry and refresh the wineglass and the plate of little nibbles. This is just the best way to spend an evening: cookage and workage. Happy Chaz.
So the curry is simmering itself into fiery tenderness, the rice is boiled and ready to pulao (sheesh, that looks so Chinese, y'know? There are of course five-and-twenty ways of constructing transliterated spellings, but maybe I'd better say pilau, to retain a sense of national clarity), the cat is fat and slumpy and I am back at work. Tippy-tappy-typey, with regular excursions downstairs to stir the curry and refresh the wineglass and the plate of little nibbles. This is just the best way to spend an evening: cookage and workage. Happy Chaz.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 06:40 pm (UTC)We love curry, but for us it's a whole bunch of different things. There's green Thai curry which has a lot of basil, and red Thai curry which I have no idea what it is other than really tasty, yellow curry which they seem to have stolen from the Chinese since it's identical to the Chinese yellow curry though they use different vegetables in the dish. Then there's red Indian curry which isn't like the Thai red curry, brown Indian curry and some kind of orange curry that we buy in the grocery story in the spice rack. It never has enough cumin for my taste.
I know "curry" is just a word for spice mix, but y'all use it to mean something that you get like we get cheeseburgers. Faeryqueen says its not Thai or Indian or Chinese, so WTF is it? :)
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 10:43 pm (UTC)In brief, then (and insofar as I remember/understand it: no facts will be checked in the assembly of this post), historically, there are two answers. Pre-1950s, curry in the UK was what had travelled here from the British Raj, India under colonial rule. There are whole books on Raj cuisine, but essentially it was a peculiar Anglo/Indian hybrid, and what came back to this country was odder still, an approximation without half the spices or the common vegetables. My mum was a classic daughter of empire: born in Rangoon, grew up in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore. I still remember her excitement, back around 1970, when she came home with the first bell pepper she'd seen since her childhood. We'd grown up on Mum's version of curry, which in common with its kind had lots of fruit in it - apples and sultanas, I remember - and stewed chicken and a spoonful of curry powder which turned it yellow and I didn't like it much.
But then the first waves of immigration brought in real Indians, who set up takeaways and restaurants and sold us a whole nother kind of curry. From your list above, I think this would be brown Indian curry (I suspect Punjabi in origin, but I'm really not sure about that). Over the years a range of classic variations has emerged, refined to the British palate, differently hot and variously spiced but identifiably that thing that we generically call curry.
More recently, yes, we too have all the variations you talk about - but when a Brit talks about going for a curry, that means Indian, and within a very specific palette.
And when I talk about a mutton curry, I may be cooking it myself, but that's still generically what I mean. Anything else, I'd have said I was cooking Thai or Chinese or Indonesian or whatever; unqualified "curry" is always Indian.
And mutton is a dark meat, so I used dark flavours to match: cloves, black cardamom, lots of cumin. I suspect you'd have liked it, if you like your curries hot. I did use a lot of chillies. I'm a wimp, a milquetoast in every other aspect of my life; with food, I'm appallingly macho.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-12 10:45 pm (UTC)Curry
Date: 2006-09-13 09:38 pm (UTC)