Mama said there'll be days like this. But, ... curry college?

A student asked me the other day if I had any quick curry recipe that I could share with him--he likes to cook not only for himself but for his wife and four kids as well.  I went all professorial on him in order to explain that there is no single curry.   "The curry powder in the grocery store is merely one combination of spices" I clarified.  "You can create many different mixes of spices, which is what Indian cooking is all about" I encouraged him.

The idea of "curry" goes back to the British in India.  Not only did they take it back to Britain, they spread it far and wide.  Even to Japan:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

The world, as I blogged quite a while ago, is one big curry pot, it seems!

Over the decades, curry has become huge in Britain.  How significant is the Indian (curry) restaurant business?  Get this; it "produces twice as much revenue as Britain’s steel industry." The curry taste has spread so much in Britain that they are tremendously short of chefs who can work the magic in restaurants:

Staff shortages are common among all types of restaurants, but they are particularly worrying for those specializing in curry.
Indian restaurants employ about 100,000 people and generated 4.2 billion British pounds, or about $6.3 billion, in sales last year, accounting for about a fifth of the entire restaurant business, according to data compiled by Karan Bilimoria, a member of the Parliament’s curry committee and the creator of Cobra beer.   

There is now a "curry committee" in the British Parliament!  I suppose you can even mess with Texas, but you can't mess around with curry in Britain ;)

Even more fascinating is this:

Mr. Bilimoria is also leading efforts to build “curry colleges” across the country with the aim of expanding the Indian restaurant business

"Curry College."  And you thought you had seen and heard it all!

Even the Brexit discussions include talking about how it will affect the curry business:

At a debate held at the House of Commons two weeks ago, Mr. Scully said the curry industry would benefit from Britain leaving the European Union. It would give Britain “more flexibility to control our borders and tackle some of the unintended consequences of immigration from outside the E.U.,” he said. “Things such as bringing curry chefs over might benefit.”

I tell ya, everyday there is plenty out there that makes it such a fascinating life.  Too bad it will all end soon! ;)

Naturally, the curry chef crisis leads to discussions on immigration--whether or not to let people in, especially when the Indian restaurants want to serve "authentic" dishes from India that the British are apparently demanding, now that they know that the "curry" is a cheap imitation of the awesome food in the Subcontinent:

“But it wasn’t really Indian food,” Ms. Collingham said. “These Indians had learned what the British in India would eat and served it back in Britain.”
Now, new Indian restaurants are trying to move beyond curry, she said, but tighter rules are choking the culinary exchanges that come with immigration.
Mr. Bilimoria agreed. “Should we expect our curry to be cooked in Delhi and flown over to us?” he asked. “No,” he said. “We need chefs right here.”

I am now drooling for the different "curries" that my mother makes.

No,, it's not what you think ;)
I clicked this earlier in the summer, when driving through Brookings and Gold Beach.
Those towns are in Curry County, here in Oregon.

The world is one big melting curry pot!

When I was a graduate student, a professor, Hugh Evans, invited a few students--all of us foreigners--to his home for a meal. Hugh was an immigrant himself--from Wales.

(Once I made a big time error, when during some casual chat during a break as the class was getting coffee and snacks, I told a fellow graduate student that Hugh was English.  He pretended to get mad that I erred about English versus Welsh!)

Anyway, his wife was also an immigrant--from Japan. The time we were invited to their place, she had, for whatever reason, taken a break from academe and other than a little bit of consulting here and there, she was mostly home.

We got to talking and it didn't take much for her to know that I was from India.  She excitedly pointed out a dish there--beef curry.  A curry made not because of any international theme, but because, she clarified, making a good curry dish in Japan means that the person knows how to cook.  Making the curry dish from scratch was apparently a mark of expertise.

Now, if they had asked me to guess, I would have ventured that it was Hugh who cooked the curry dish, given the British connections.  It was quite a learning experience that day.

Soon after that, coincidentally, I discovered that a Japanese fast food joint in the LA area--I have forgotten that name--had on its menu a beef curry with white rice. I would never have guessed, way back in India, that curry would have such a vaulted status in Japan.

It was much later in life that I read in a short piece in the NY Times magazine that:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

The world has become one big common kitchen.  A few years ago, the chicken tikka masala became the national dish of sorts in the UK, displacing the traditional fish-n-chips as the most ordered item.  Sushi is big time here in America.  There aren't many cities around the world without pizza places.

What a contrast to my grandmother's life!  She ate nothing but the traditional Tamil brahmin food her entire life, and her biggest excitement was with the "English vegetables," and cauliflower in particular.  Now, her grandchildren have an overflowing number of food choices from so many different cultures. 

As one who likes tasty food, and enjoys cooking my own variations, I cannot imagine the dull life that it would have been a couple of centuries ago.  But then, what we don't know doesn't hurt us, eh!

Maybe it is the sheer number of choices that we now have in our everyday life that is making us all stressed out and less happy.  Maybe if porridge is all one knew and had, then that porridge everyday would be something we would have excitedly looked forward to?

Nah!  :)

From India to England to Japan: Curry

When I was a graduate student, a professor invited a few students--all of us foreigners--to his home for a meal. He himself was from Wales, and his wife was from Japan. One of the dishes there was a curry. Interesting, I thought, and reasoned it was because of the UK connection. Not so. The professor's wife explained to me that making the curry dish from scratch was a mark of expertise in Japan. In Japan!!!

It was about the same time that I discovered that a Japanese fast food joint in the LA area--I have forgotten that name--had on its menu a beef curry with white rice. I would never have guessed, way back in India, that curry would have such a vaulted status in Japan.

These memories have been stirred by a short piece in the NY Times magazine. It notes that:

katsu curry dates to the Meiji era of the late 19th century, soon after the opening of Japan’s borders. Japanese trade with the West led to a national fascination with foreign flavors and textures — a kind of reverse-twist culinary version of the Japonisme that gripped Europe around the same time. (There was until recently a curry museum located in Yokohama, one of Japan’s most prominent ports.)

I wonder if there was any equivalent import of Japanese food habit into the Indian kitchen?