Re: Can it be Curry?

On 21/06/12 18:33, Sibyl Smirl wrote:
Start by heating the oil, fry your onions (some curries call for a lot

>> of onions, others just a little) and adding the spices, then brown the
>> meat - not pre-cooked left over meat - raw meat. Beef, chicken, lamb -
>> I favour lamb, myself. Curry is a stew and the meat should be cooked
>> with the spices, simmered gently for a while - sometimes even left
>> overnight to cool and then re-heated next day so that the spices infuse
>> the meat. I cannot imagine a curry made with canned condensed soup.
>> <shudder>
>
> Every one is different, really. I'd rather make a gravy or white
> sauce from the beginning, myself, but a lot of Americans _do_ use
> canned soup for gravy or white sauce to make it easier, and Laurie
> wanted "simple". Your way is nice if you're using fresh meat for the
> meat, but again, I described "simplest" and said you could go on from
> there as you liked, if you like the curry flavor and want to get more
> authentic, either British authentic, Scottish authentic, or India
> authentic. Mine was American "get a cheap supper in a hurry, that
> tastes good" authentic.
>
> But it's not a casserole, it's not all mixed and cooked together, any
> more than canned spaghetti that's already saturated with its sauce is
> "spaghetti". The canned spaghetti is the "spaghetti casserole". You
> could better call it "stew on top of rice" (which is also possible for
> a supper, but if the rice is cooked _in_ the stew, that's all stew.)
>
>

The word curry describes a vast range of dishes and every time I cook
one it's different. I've got all of the usual Indian spices to hand but
there are curries from other parts of Asia too. Thai curry, Indonesian
curry - there's a vast number.

The rice accompaniment is not a given either. In large parts of India
they use various sorts of bread to soak up the cooking juices. Meat
isn't compulsory either, a curry is a great way to make relatively bland
vegetables more interesting. Sweet-potato and chickpea curry is one of
my favourites.


--
Bernard Peek
bap@shrdlu.com