Monday, August 30, 2004
currying Favour
Title
Currying Favor
A global dish, curry has been finding its way into cultures other than its own! Curry Katsu Is popular in Japan. But is seems that there are possi-bilities that curry Kari, kaaree ’ karahi or karai, ‘ kari’ may not be Indian at All these names refer to spicy sauce the origins being in the Tamil word ‘ kari.
In the excellent Oxford Companion to Food, written by Alan Davidson he quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘ Carriel ’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha , with chilli-based curry powder called ‘ caril ’.
In India there is no reference to curry on menus so confusion reigns as to the true history.
Most likely it was a product of the British Raj along with Chicken Jahlfrezi, Mulligatawny and Kedgeree, finding their way into a cuisine by popular demand.
The taste for Indian food and curries has remained constant over the years, brought into the mainstream of British households in packets by company ’s such as Vesta, Most definitely not the real thing but we liked it and I grew up on it.
There have been curry fashions over the years Balti was one of the most recent.
A reinvention of British curry by somebody with a good eye for marketing,
It caught on like wildfire and Balti houses sprang up everywhere. The heart of this style of cooking is a cast-iron pot, originally also called the Balti . The Balti is always cooked and served in a half-round pot usually made of steel or iron, and usually called the karahi or karai .
Typically served with Balti is naan bread, a thin leavened bread made with yoghurt and torn up and used as an eating implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the sauce. A messy but enjoyable method of freestyle eating.
Balti in Europe started attracting notice during the last decade in Bir-mingham in England, particularly in the city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti houses, and now in-creasingly known as "the Balti Belt." Word spread quickly throughout the country and abroad, Balti houses sprung up all over and added to the myth of curry from Baltistan .
Chikken Tikka Masala, an old Indian classic dish?
Well no it seems to have come from Scotland in an Glasgow curry house probably between 1950-1970 a customer asked for gravy on his Chicken Tikka .
A bemused chef responded by adding tin of Campbell's tomato soup and pinch of spices, unwittingly partaking in early example of fusion cookery.
It could almost now be Britain’s national dish Sainsbury's sell 1.6 million Chicken Tikka Masala meals every year and stocks 16 types of Tikka products including chicken tikka masala pasta sauce . Marks and Spencer's famous Tikka sandwich (18 tonnes sold every week).
Now there are several English companies exporting chicken tikka masala to India so coals to Newcastle!
Ten years ago there was a quiet revolution happening in the shape of the Bombay brassiere .
A new restaurant owned by the Taj group of hotels with Chef Udit Sarhkel Real Indian food served cooked with Passion in luxurious surroundings.
Their Sunday buffets were legendary.
He now heads up his own restaurant in Southfields which has drawn many plaudits for its informed and skilled Indian regional food.
The Red Fort was one of the first high class gourmet Indian restaurants based in Soho to raise the bar in culinary terms, followed more recently with Zaika 1 Michelin star , and the Cinnamon Club in the old Westminster library also with a Michelin star .
Both have in common the involvement of a European chef for presentation and stylising the dishes, yet again Indian food takes on a new persona, upwardly mobile and constantly evolving.
Quite an achievement for an adapted food in a foreign country , it has now become part of our culinary culture and we could not do without curry culture long may it continue.
Contacts
The red Fort
http://www.redfort.co.uk
77-Dean street London W1
020 74372525
Zaika
http://www.zaika-restaurant.co.uk
No1 Kensington High Street
London W8 5SF
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7795 6533
Fax: +44 (0) 207 937 8854
Sarkhel's
http://www.sarkhels.com/
199 Replingham Road, Southfields, London, SW18 5LY
Telephone 020 8870 1483
Currying Favor
A global dish, curry has been finding its way into cultures other than its own! Curry Katsu Is popular in Japan. But is seems that there are possi-bilities that curry Kari, kaaree ’ karahi or karai, ‘ kari’ may not be Indian at All these names refer to spicy sauce the origins being in the Tamil word ‘ kari.
In the excellent Oxford Companion to Food, written by Alan Davidson he quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘ Carriel ’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha , with chilli-based curry powder called ‘ caril ’.
In India there is no reference to curry on menus so confusion reigns as to the true history.
Most likely it was a product of the British Raj along with Chicken Jahlfrezi, Mulligatawny and Kedgeree, finding their way into a cuisine by popular demand.
The taste for Indian food and curries has remained constant over the years, brought into the mainstream of British households in packets by company ’s such as Vesta, Most definitely not the real thing but we liked it and I grew up on it.
There have been curry fashions over the years Balti was one of the most recent.
A reinvention of British curry by somebody with a good eye for marketing,
It caught on like wildfire and Balti houses sprang up everywhere. The heart of this style of cooking is a cast-iron pot, originally also called the Balti . The Balti is always cooked and served in a half-round pot usually made of steel or iron, and usually called the karahi or karai .
Typically served with Balti is naan bread, a thin leavened bread made with yoghurt and torn up and used as an eating implement, to scoop up the Balti and get at the sauce. A messy but enjoyable method of freestyle eating.
Balti in Europe started attracting notice during the last decade in Bir-mingham in England, particularly in the city's Sparkhill and Sparkbrook areas, home of some of the oldest and best Balti houses, and now in-creasingly known as "the Balti Belt." Word spread quickly throughout the country and abroad, Balti houses sprung up all over and added to the myth of curry from Baltistan .
Chikken Tikka Masala, an old Indian classic dish?
Well no it seems to have come from Scotland in an Glasgow curry house probably between 1950-1970 a customer asked for gravy on his Chicken Tikka .
A bemused chef responded by adding tin of Campbell's tomato soup and pinch of spices, unwittingly partaking in early example of fusion cookery.
It could almost now be Britain’s national dish Sainsbury's sell 1.6 million Chicken Tikka Masala meals every year and stocks 16 types of Tikka products including chicken tikka masala pasta sauce . Marks and Spencer's famous Tikka sandwich (18 tonnes sold every week).
Now there are several English companies exporting chicken tikka masala to India so coals to Newcastle!
Ten years ago there was a quiet revolution happening in the shape of the Bombay brassiere .
A new restaurant owned by the Taj group of hotels with Chef Udit Sarhkel Real Indian food served cooked with Passion in luxurious surroundings.
Their Sunday buffets were legendary.
He now heads up his own restaurant in Southfields which has drawn many plaudits for its informed and skilled Indian regional food.
The Red Fort was one of the first high class gourmet Indian restaurants based in Soho to raise the bar in culinary terms, followed more recently with Zaika 1 Michelin star , and the Cinnamon Club in the old Westminster library also with a Michelin star .
Both have in common the involvement of a European chef for presentation and stylising the dishes, yet again Indian food takes on a new persona, upwardly mobile and constantly evolving.
Quite an achievement for an adapted food in a foreign country , it has now become part of our culinary culture and we could not do without curry culture long may it continue.
Contacts
The red Fort
http://www.redfort.co.uk
77-Dean street London W1
020 74372525
Zaika
http://www.zaika-restaurant.co.uk
No1 Kensington High Street
London W8 5SF
Tel: +44 (0) 20 7795 6533
Fax: +44 (0) 207 937 8854
Sarkhel's
http://www.sarkhels.com/
199 Replingham Road, Southfields, London, SW18 5LY
Telephone 020 8870 1483
cured
Cured
6am time to go to work, quite pleasant this time of year the sun is up before me! No more inky blackness to start my day.
Its Tuesday and the day we cure bacon, the imminent arrival of the pork from the farm always has everybody alert and at the ready to pounce on the van as soon as it arrives.
20 sides of rare breed pork soon arrive and have to be unloaded; it helps remove the calories happily stored after the early morning bacon sandwich and copious cups of tea!
Once the meat has been hung in the fridge, the butchery can start.
The animals are broken down into their component parts legs for hams and roasting
Shoulders are split and the hand-trotter half are used for sausages, some legs also go to make up our sausages, but it is the middles the loin and belly that is used for curing bacon.
We produce smoked and green bacon, ultimately the same process except for the additional smoking.
The middles are boned out and carefully rubbed with curing salt with the addition of brown sugar for added sweetness.
There is a hive of activity at the shop when all the butchers apply themselves to producing the weeks bacon a constant stream of pigs coming out of the fridge to be cut and the resulting products disappearing back into the fridge as bacon and cuts of pork.
The curing takes about a week, the middles are removed, and the salt is washed off to arrest the curing process, they are then hung to dry for a couple of days.
Bacon for smoking is then selected and sent back to Yorkshire for smoking where they are smoked slowly for 72 hours over oak for a deep flavor.
The product we end up with produces no water when it is fried a real dry cure and packed with flavour I can almost hear it sizzling in the pan!
6am time to go to work, quite pleasant this time of year the sun is up before me! No more inky blackness to start my day.
Its Tuesday and the day we cure bacon, the imminent arrival of the pork from the farm always has everybody alert and at the ready to pounce on the van as soon as it arrives.
20 sides of rare breed pork soon arrive and have to be unloaded; it helps remove the calories happily stored after the early morning bacon sandwich and copious cups of tea!
Once the meat has been hung in the fridge, the butchery can start.
The animals are broken down into their component parts legs for hams and roasting
Shoulders are split and the hand-trotter half are used for sausages, some legs also go to make up our sausages, but it is the middles the loin and belly that is used for curing bacon.
We produce smoked and green bacon, ultimately the same process except for the additional smoking.
The middles are boned out and carefully rubbed with curing salt with the addition of brown sugar for added sweetness.
There is a hive of activity at the shop when all the butchers apply themselves to producing the weeks bacon a constant stream of pigs coming out of the fridge to be cut and the resulting products disappearing back into the fridge as bacon and cuts of pork.
The curing takes about a week, the middles are removed, and the salt is washed off to arrest the curing process, they are then hung to dry for a couple of days.
Bacon for smoking is then selected and sent back to Yorkshire for smoking where they are smoked slowly for 72 hours over oak for a deep flavor.
The product we end up with produces no water when it is fried a real dry cure and packed with flavour I can almost hear it sizzling in the pan!
pigs and swords
A busy week and a diverse one at that.
I have reached the grand old age of 48.
I have been interviewed for the food program on Radio 4 about British charcuterie .
All about the history and culture of English food and why we have turned away from the old ways.
The old ways and recipes are making a comeback and I am cited as one of the few people who are championing this resurgence, which is quite flattering, it has also driven me do research some more lost or unused recipes the medieval period throws up some interesting things like Doucette which is a early sausage made with honey.
August is holiday season and London is quiet our customers are all away abroad or in the country.
Most of Europe is the same ,the cities become devoid of the local populace and fill with tourists, and not to be left out I beat a hasty departure for Sussex and the medieval festival at Hurstmonceuex .
I was drawn by the thought a hog roast, the whole pig roasted over oak wood, and maybe a glass of two of mead (old English honey wine).
The great spectacle of 500 hundred medieval troops laying siege to a medieval castle and all in all a good day out.
All of the events are organized by the siege society who put on a great show, everybody in authentic dress, suits of armor and lots of weaponry, fun is had all round, they get to fire cannon and fight with swords and the spectators have a great time.
There are strolling minstrels , dancing bears, food ,explosions .jousting and various horseback related demonstrations.
Archery plays a large part in the festival there are opportunities for the public to have a go, the bows appear crude but in the hands of experts they are accurate and deadly the English have been masters of the long bow for hundreds of years ,as the French found out at Agincourt .
Within the next couple of weeks the BBC will be calling again this time to record master chef I believe my task is to tech someone to make sausages in an hour and they will be judged on their results , that should be most interesting!
I have reached the grand old age of 48.
I have been interviewed for the food program on Radio 4 about British charcuterie .
All about the history and culture of English food and why we have turned away from the old ways.
The old ways and recipes are making a comeback and I am cited as one of the few people who are championing this resurgence, which is quite flattering, it has also driven me do research some more lost or unused recipes the medieval period throws up some interesting things like Doucette which is a early sausage made with honey.
August is holiday season and London is quiet our customers are all away abroad or in the country.
Most of Europe is the same ,the cities become devoid of the local populace and fill with tourists, and not to be left out I beat a hasty departure for Sussex and the medieval festival at Hurstmonceuex .
I was drawn by the thought a hog roast, the whole pig roasted over oak wood, and maybe a glass of two of mead (old English honey wine).
The great spectacle of 500 hundred medieval troops laying siege to a medieval castle and all in all a good day out.
All of the events are organized by the siege society who put on a great show, everybody in authentic dress, suits of armor and lots of weaponry, fun is had all round, they get to fire cannon and fight with swords and the spectators have a great time.
There are strolling minstrels , dancing bears, food ,explosions .jousting and various horseback related demonstrations.
Archery plays a large part in the festival there are opportunities for the public to have a go, the bows appear crude but in the hands of experts they are accurate and deadly the English have been masters of the long bow for hundreds of years ,as the French found out at Agincourt .
Within the next couple of weeks the BBC will be calling again this time to record master chef I believe my task is to tech someone to make sausages in an hour and they will be judged on their results , that should be most interesting!
