How to Make Curry
Wanting to know how to make curry is a bit like trying to find out the length of a straight line. The answer you get depends on who you ask, where you ask them – and how.
Ask an Indian or Sri Lankan how to make curry and they’ll give you two different answers – the Sri Lankan’s will have more coconut and chilli while the Indian’s will generally be earthier and more aromatic. A South Indian will tell you how to make curry in a way more similar to the Sri Lankan than a North Indian, though all three will differ on almost all the important points – heat, weight of spicing, best meat or vegetable to curry and best accompaniments to have with the dish.
How to make curry is as much a cultural thing as a question of geography or type. Go to Thailand and ask how to make curry and you’ll be greeted with two distinct answers: non-Buddhist Thais will point you in the direction of galangal, coconut milk, green chilli and fish, while a Buddhist asked how to make curry will show you thick fiery pastes designed to make the most of a vegetarian diet. No Thai or Indian curry will use dairy products – the cow is sacred to the Hindu – so milk or cream are straight out: if an Indian shows you how to make curry with cheese you’ll be using paneer, which is a form of curdled whey that has as little to do with dairy cheese as ghee (Indian butter) resembles Lurpak.
How to make curry like an Indian for an Indian, or a Sri Lankan for a Sri Lankan, is a different proposition from, say, how to make curry for tourists. A Sri Lankan, for example, will have a recipe for how to make curry that doesn’t blow the heads off of visiting English; and a recipe for how to make curry that she’s known for years, her family recipe, which would put even the most beery Brit off the idea for life. You’ll find the same thing in reverse in English curry houses – ask a curry chef in Birmingham how to make curry and he’ll probably ask you how drunk his prospective customer is. The standard curry in the British curry restaurant is a reasonable, if oily, impersonation of the dish it purports to be – but there’s always a big gun in reserve, saved specifically for tourists who think that a “good” curry isn’t complete without a bucket to catch the sweat in afterwards. How to make curry for the Englishman who thinks he knows what “real” curry is, is simple: pour half a ton of chilli seeds over some tinned tomatoes and chicken. Et voila – the Vindaloo. The curry that never was, invented by the English for the English for no readily discernible reason other than the UK’s continued fascination with self-immolation. How to make curry properly starts here: ignore anything that drunk people in town centres think is curry and you won’t go far wrong.
