Utility Curry!

Yes, well I had aimed to be doing this a bit more regularly but alas trouble with uploading the photos delayed this somewhat! Anyhow what I also meant to include in the last post was the fact this recipe grew out of Savoury Apples, which comes from a Second World War cookbook that you can still get in your library – published by the Daily Telegraph from the recipes sent in by their readers. 

This week’s post is going to be Utility Curry. I don’t know if any of you came across it but recently here in Glasgow we’ve had a spate of reports on take away curries not being made from the meats they purport to be – and we’re not talking about horsemeat here.  And given that we’ve had snow, well up to our ankles at least, but what really has been unpleasant has been the wind, it’s been simply freezing cold, got me to thinking about curry. I admit, I thought we had been eating curry in this country since the days of the Raj and the returning of colonial types, but I was reading through a reprint of Eliza Acton’s recipes, based on her writings from 1845 – a good deal earlier than I had thought, and I came across a “Mr Arnott’s Currie Powder”.  This is a basic curry powder, with simply huge quantities, but you can reduce these and it makes a very acceptable rub. I put it down in teaspoons, and of course in this day and age we have no need of the chemist she recommends to pound the spices and put them through the fine lawn sieves – simply buy them from your supermarket and mix!

2 teaspoons of turmeric

1 teaspoon of coriander seed

1 teaspoon of cumin seed

½ a teaspoon of Fenugreek

2 teaspoons of cayenne pepper

Mix and you can store the excess in a clean dry old spice bottle and it’s to hand when you need it.  Sprinkle it over whatever fish or meat – or indeed vegetable, you’re going to use, rub it in well and pop it in the frying pan to cook appropriately.

But to get the best out of this, you need to make and keep in the deep freeze portions of my Utility Curry – inspired by the vegetable curries of WWII. Once you’ve defrosted one of these in the nuke machine, otherwise known as the microwave, you heat it in a pan, and add it to your meat, fish or veg of choice, and allow it to sauté together until cooked to bring out all of the flavour of a homemade curry, where you know every ingredient and where it comes from. Add poppadom or two, and perhaps a few vegetable side dishes and there you have every bit as good a meal as any takeaway could provide. But here’s the utility curry recipe.

A good thumb sized piece of ginger, peeled and finely grated.

1 and a half onions, finely chopped (adjust quantity to the size of your onions)

2 cloves of garlic.

A good squeeze of lemongrass paste.

I sauté my onions in a dab of olive oil, and add a dash of freshly boiled water to increase the steam. I then added the ginger, garlic, and lemongrass (about an inch and a half of squeeze.) This helps to cook the onions thoroughly, and additionally, I find it helps to turn the ginger, lemongrass and garlic into a paste effect.  As it dries out, add more of Eliza Acton’s spice mix and this gives the spices a good roasting – I added chilli flakes, and pounded cardamom seeds. 

I chop vegetables roughly for this curry; I like the rustic effect but chop your veg as finely as you want. For this particular curry I used carrots, a big leek, and courgettes. 

This was my base veg mix, and although I didn’t, you can of course add tomato’s, from either a tin or fresh if you have them, but if you were going to use fresh, I would have halved them, drizzled a little olive oil over them and a pinch of salt and pepper and popped them into a low oven for a couple of hours before using them. I would have added a good squeeze of tomato puree too. As a purely side comment, I didn’t use tomato’s in this curry at all because my heartburn is quite bad at the moment, and they exacerbate it. It’s a highly acidic fruit. 

Anyhow all of these veg are added to the pot, and you can choose from any veg that you want for this curry.  Really good additions include squash, beetroot or cauliflower, but I tend to avoid broccoli  and all of the cabbage style veg, whose strong flavour tends to dominate the mix. I added a good dash of water as well, and cooked it in the oven for a good hour at a medium heat, 180 degrees C. I also added left over potato’s I had cooked earlier in the week with rosemary and thyme – this is an excellent recipe for using up leftover veg. This is a utility curry, and you should use what you have to hand, or what’s on offer at the supermarket, or come into harvest in your garden.  I added sweetcorn – taken off the cobs, and French beans when I reheated it the following day. It’s definitely a curry that improves with keeping.

For my addition, to turn my utility veggie curry into a beef curry I cut up a half of sirloin steak I had leftover. A big pack of steak is far too much to eat in one go, and besides which, at the price of it these days, it’s better stretched into at least two meals. I gave it a good rub with the curry powder, left it to sit for 15 minutes, then heated a dab of oil in a pan and sautéed it until it was well done – if I had been eating it pure so to speak I prefer my steaks done rare to medium, but for a curry, you definitely want the crusty caramalisation of well done steak. When I was satisfied it was done, I transferred a couple of spoonfuls of my utility curry and mixed well – in particular I added a good spoonful of the juice, to ensure that I deglazed the pan. I gave it a good five minutes over a medium heat to ensure everything was well heated through, and I served it with basmati rice.

The curry then divided up into a further five portions of curry that go into the deep freeze. I can either get them out on the morning of a day I know I’m going to fancy curry, and I could cut up fish chunks to rub with the spice mix, or I could do prawns – I particularly like a prawn curry, my parents used to make this!, Chicken is also particularly good, and because you are adding this to a ready cooked base curry, you can either add more water, or yoghurt to the spice mix, and pop it into the oven for half an hour and cook say chicken thighs from raw, or if you have left over roast chicken, stir it into a frying pan on high for ten minutes to reheat – again with extra water, or yoghurt. Always ensure that this curry does not dry out.

I make no pretence that this is any sort of adapted real Asian curry recipe – it’s not. What it is is an English curry, descended out of years of experimentation where Colonel Blimp from Tunbridge Wells fancied a recreation of the meals he had enjoyed in the 1920’s. In fact it’s directly that, because my own mother was posted to India in WWII. This is exactly the curry she fed us as children – it makes no pretence towards authenticity beyond what it is. English Utility Curry, except of course nowadays we have the real spices. My mother had to make do with “curry powder”, whereas I’m lucky enough to be able to buy the actual spices and mix it to my tastes. It’s important that you use this recipe as a guide, not as something set in stone. Adapt it to your tastes – add more of this, less of that. If you hate carrots, leave them out and put squash and tomatos in. Taste it as you go along, make a note of what works and what doesn’t for the next time.