I just loved chef Rick Stein’s absorbing BBC series a few years back: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/mediapacks/food/rick-stein.html The story line was a quest for the best Indian curry, forming a fascinating travelogue laden with personal childhood memories, cultural notes and experiences, videos of people including Rick preparing curries, and of course a few recipes. One of the lasting benefits of Empire was the advent of curry in British cuisine, and it is claimed by some that the best Indian curries anywhere are found in London.
I’d like to bring you ‘curry’ from my own childhood, spent in that far corner of the British Empire, Launceston, Tasmania. Our family tradition was that the Birthday Girl chose the menu for dinner that night, and like it or not, we all had to eat it. Sister Rosemary always chose Tripe in white parsley and onion sauce, with mashed potato and peas or beans. Sal’s choice was always Pork Fillets, in which the fillets were egg and breadcrumbed, fried and served with a wedge of lemon, mashed potato, a green veg and carrots. My own favourite was Mum’s curry. Until I left home I had no idea people curried all kinds of foods including nuts and vegetables, even made curries without any kind of flesh, legged, shelled or finned. I was equally ignorant about ‘spaghetti’, too, which I will share in another post.
Mum’s Timeless Curry cooking, Nov. 10 2018.
Somewhere in my cookbooks in storage is Mum’s handwritten curry recipe. It was always lamb, and the recipe never varied.
You need a finely diced large onion; a good dollop to taste of curry powder ie. 1/2 cup or heaped Tbsp (if making for the first time choose medium strength). Saute onions and curry powder in some drippings from the weekend roast. To these you add 2-3 cups of diced lamb, a stock cube dissolved in 1-2 cups of water, and a dsp of tomato concentrate. When that’s bubbling turn it down to simmer gently and add in a cup+ of sultanas and wedge of squeezed lemon to be removed before serving with steamed rice. Accompaniments: small bowls of salted peanuts, home-made tomato chutney, banana slices tossed in lemon juice, desiccated coconut, and if seasonal, diced or sliced cucumber. (The word ‘yoghurt’ was never mentioned in decent Australian homes in the 1950s) The recipe included “S&P to taste” and an optional pinch of garlic that I never actually saw Mum add. In that recipe she wrote “I find many people use far too much garlic.” When we cleaned out her kitchen after her death we found her powdered garlic container was full of fine cobwebs –she hadn’t used that option for a while!