I Love Curry

Yes, I love curry, too.  Alas, it is one of those items that often seem to be a bit complicated. On more than one occasion, I have reverted to a generic curry powder.  I find curry recipes are often incredibly long and on any given occasion, I have about half the spices. While surfing Twitter, I ran across a recommendation for this book, I Love Curry by Anjum Anand. 


Anjum is a frequent BBC presenter with several books under her belt.  She also has a brand of mixed curry spices that one can find on Amazon, but not in most grocery stores.

This book is a great introduction to making curry.  Yes, the recipes have a lot of ingredients, but many of them are already in your pantry.  You will need to read your recipe very carefully and you might need a day to gather all your ingredients, but for most part, the recipes are easy to replicate.  There is a good mix of spicy and mild recipes, both meat and vegetarian, so there is something for everyone.

Here is her take on a spicy lamb curry that is very nice, a bit spicy.

Spicy Lamb, Tomato, and Coconut Curry

1 tbsp coriander seeds
1 tsp cumin seeds
15 black peppercorns
5cm cinnamon stick
4 cloves
500g boneless or 600g bone-in lamb leg or shoulder, cubed
3 small onions, finely chopped
3 tomatoes, chopped
15g ginger, peeled weight, grated into a paste
8 fat garlic cloves, grated into a paste
3-6 green chillies, whole but pierced
Salt, to taste
2 tbsp ghee, or vegetable oil and butter
200-300ml coconut milk, or to taste
1½ tsp lemon juice, or to taste

Using a spice grinder or a good mortar and pestle, pound the whole spices to a fine powder.

Place the lamb, two of the chopped onions, tomatoes, ginger, garlic, chillies, spices and salt in a large saucepan. Add 500ml water, bring to a boil, then cover and cook gently for 45-60 minutes, or until the lamb is cooked and tender. Give the pot a stir every 10 minutes or so.

After about 45 minutes, melt the ghee in a small saucepan and fry the remaining onion until well browned.

There shouldn’t be too much liquid left in the pan once the lamb is cooked. Cook off any excess moisture in the pan over a high flame for six or seven minutes, stirring quite often, until the sauce has mostly been absorbed by the lamb. This bhunoing process will help homogenise the sauce and deepen the flavours. Add the browned onion and ghee.

Pour in the coconut milk and lemon juice, bring to a boil and simmer for five minutes; the sauce should be thick and creamy. Taste and adjust the seasoning, adding lemon juice or coconut milk until the dish is perfect for you, then serve.

I do love getting recommendations from the Internet!  This one was a winner.

The Working Girl Must Eat

Who knew the 1930’s were such a liberating era. All those modern women living in the Village, attending plays by Susan Glaspell, watching Bette Davis and Kate Hepburn on the movie screen, wearing cool hats over their bobbed hair and working 9-to-5. But after five... the working girl must eat.



Hazel Young felt the same way and provided an economical and pre-planned cookbook which she titled, matteroffactly, The Working Girl Must Eat. In her introduction, she summed it up this way.

“This business of meal-getting has always seemed like quite a chore even when women stayed at home all day and made it their major occupation. But it becomes much more of a problem with us modern girls. We are emaciated and can “live our own lives”! We are free to work all day in office, or school, or factory, and then rush home and get our own and possibly our husband’s dinner. As the Scotchman said: “It takes a good bit of doing.””

While I am all for the working girl eating, some of these menus are just a bit convoluted. Our recipe today comes from Menu 19 which suggests the following dinner:

Curry of Oysters
Boiled Rice
Buttered Asparagus
Stuffed Celery Salad
Apple Brown Betty
Apricot Rice Whip

I think that perhaps, we should not be having both the Apple Brown Betty and the Apricot Rice Whip with our curry. Clearly, Hazel Young, was so busy working that she failed to realize that Menu 19 had two desserts. Just to let you know, Apricot Whip includes strawberry jelly, canned apricots, rice and heavy cream…yum!

As for the curry, Young tells us girls out there living our own lives:

"A seasoning that is too little used by Americans is curry. We think we must have some special Indian recipe before we can venture to try it. But that isn’t true. We must be sure, of course, that we really like curry, then we can start experimenting with it. It’s surprising how it will pep up an ordinary lamb stew and it’s grand with oysters."

Curry of Oysters

1 pint of oysters
4 tablespoons butter
1 cup oyster liquor and rich milk
1 1/2 tablespoons flour
Dash of salt
Dash of pepper
1/4 teaspoon curry powder

Sauté oysters very gently in 2 tablespoons butter until edges begin to curl. Remove from fire. Drain, reserve liquor; add rich milk to make 1 cup. Melt remaining 2 tablespoons butter in a saucepan and stir in flour and seasonings. Ass oyster liquor and milk gradually and cook over low flame until thickened, stirring constantly. Add oysters and heat thoroughly. Serve with boiled rice.

I don't know about you, but I think this afternoon I might just run out and get me a job... and a tin of curry.

Dinners That Wait

Dinners That Wait by Betty Wason is a great little menu cookbook from the early 1950’s that positively reeks of a Douglas Sirk film!

Mrs. Wason tells us in her introduction,

“It is a well known fact that both the cook-hostess and her guest will enjoy a dinner more if she can spend a leisurely moment with them before eating. But, unfortunately, many a cook is up to her elbows at this time in dinner preparations while her guests try to entertain themselves.”

I wonder where the cook-hostesses “hubby” was while she was up to her elbows cooking and the guests were milling about in the living room watching that deer out the window.

I guess it is just too much of an effort to ask Mr. Wason to chat up the guests! It's rather easy, just sit down next to a guest while your wife slaves in the kitchen.


For tonight's dinner party, we have chosen the exotic dish called Beef Curry. We know it is "exotic" thanks to the burka-wearing babe standing next to that big jar of curry. For this dish we are "looking to the timeless East" which I think of as Connecticut. In the 50's, evidently, the "timeless East" was located somewhere, or perhaps, everywhere east of Britain.

Beef Curry

3 pounds beef, boneless chuck
1 or 2 cloves garlic, minced
1/2 cup onions, chopped fine
2 tablespoons vegetable fat
1 1/2 tablespoons curry powder
1/2 cup seedless raisins
1 medium apple (optional)
3 1/2 cups water
1 green pepper, minced (optional)
1/2 to 3/4 teaspoon salt

Cut the beef into 1-inch cubes. Melt the fat in a large skillet. Add the beef, and brown quickly on all sides. Then lower the heat, add onions, garlic, green pepper, and salt. Now add the curry powder stirring it to blend thoroughly with the meat and chopped vegetables. The quality of the curry powder is all-important. Splurge on the very best you can find. The cheaper curry powders are sharper, with a much larger proportion of turmeric, and can ruin the dish entirely. Finally add the raisins, sliced apples, and water, and cover. Simmer at least 1 hour, until the meat is tender when pricked with a fork. Put aside until ready to reheat and serve.