Food and Food Culture

Yup. Add some rice and extra potatoes and fry it up a bit, add a nice egg on top, and you have one of my favorite breakfasts.

I'd rather just take corned beef, mashed potatoes, baked beans, and bake the lot after mixing. Also I'm far more likely to have extra mashed potato around so that's even less work...

I need to stop forgetting to e.g. Get any of the curry related stuff when I plan to make curry.

Which type of curry do you prefer? I'm Korean, so obviously it's always nice, thick, Korean-style curry for me. Japanese curry is a close second.

Indian dishes because this is the UK.

EDIT: I had an entire container of garam masala at home I completely forgot about.

Edited by RainehDaze on Mar 27th 2020 at 8:25:36 AM

Oh yeah, that is a thing, isn't it? So strange, I'd never really known how culturally ingrained Indian cuisine was in the UK.

Even dinky cornershops tend to sell various jars of curry sauce and/or paste and tubs of curry powder. With Uncle Ben's regrettable microwave basmati sachets to go with, at the very least. If not small bags of honest to goodness plain basmati — phew! Oh, and mango chutney is highly probable, too. And, bags of ready-made papads and those horrible little ready "naans" that I can't stand due to what they do to me. Oh, and Bombay mix. Which won't leap into my basket at all, even when I just popped in for milk. Nope. Nah-uh.

Not to mention having chicken tikka masala ready meals in the freezer.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 27th 2020 at 9:42:00 AM

They say fish and chips is the national dish of England at least.

Wrong. It's chicken tikka masala. London fuels itself on that, not petroleum.

The British also adore chutney. Growing up in Hong Kong, I can confirm that the expats take their love of Indian food with them. And us locals love Indian food too.

Edited by TheWildWestPyro on Mar 27th 2020 at 3:07:16 AM

Just finished making a 6-quart (roughly 6 liters) batch of Japanese curry, incidentally. My sister bought two pounds of chuck steak instead of the one that I asked for, so I made all of it into a curry instead. We are now going to be consuming nothing but curry and Japanese pickles for the next week.

Not that I’m complaining; I absolutely love Japanese curry.

To be fair, tikka massala as it is was probably first made in the UK, so...

Eventually the love of curry spread throughout the UK.

Hasn't stopped India, Pakistan and Bangladesh from occasionally trying to take the credit. As well as start serving it as a regular thing, too.

Chicken tikka masala is just that degree of splurge-tastic comfort food. Thanks, Birmingham: you did the world a solid.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 27th 2020 at 11:11:53 AM

Isn’t there contention as to the true origins of tikka masala?

Nope.

Brick Lane, Birmingham. Restaurants there started adapting recipes. Not necessarily just to suit British tastes, but mostly to account for gaps in available ingredients. They were usually first-gen immigrants from the subcontinent who were still trying to produce the mouth-feel of ghee without necessarily being able to get it in sustainable bulk. Hence the heavy leaning on cream and coconut milk/cream.

The rich tikka masala that developed evolved from that necessity. That... and, it sold right out of the gate. Even while it was still in its shaky early days.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 27th 2020 at 11:20:48 AM

Bangladeshi migrant chefs working in Brick Lane, Birmingham, if I'm recalling correctly.

Though there was also a chef in Glasgow claiming to invent it. Either way.

There's also a claim from Bradford.

But the balance of probability is with Birmingham, since it was the immigration hub for the Midlands and North. It just had a larger community from the start because of that town planning spree the place went on post-War.

It was almost as badly flattened as Coventry, so it had to.

Between giving us tikka masala and the Bull Ring, NEC and generalised CBD concrete hell... The curry wins as the city's better post-War development it needed immigration to produce.

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 27th 2020 at 11:58:52 AM

It's something Birmingham produced that the rest of the country can understand and enjoy. Unlike its accent.

Haven’t eaten much Indian curry relatively speaking. I usually go for Japanese style curry dishes. I particularly like fried pork cutlet curry rice.

Yes, corned beef hash comes in cans. With or without an egg, and with an extra dose of salt and pepper, it makes a good I-don't-want-to-cook-but-I've-gotta-eat-something meal.

Unfortunately, it also lasts forever, being a canned food, it's high in protein and starch, and it's flying off the shelves faster than they can restock - helped by scalpers.

Yeah, I also generally go for Japanese curry more than Indian curry given the chance, though I wouldn’t be one to turn down a good lamb curry if I was offered one.

I think it’s because Japanese curry is more about achieving a balance of flavors and textures, hence why a good Japanese curry is spicy, sweet and savory all at once.

Balance is overrated.

??? All curry is about balancing the flavours. Sweet, spicy/strong (things like garlic and goat count as "strong", not just the hottest chilli around or the most cardamom of cardamoms), sour, salt and sea (can count as "spicy").

The subcontinent doesn't shy away from the strong flavours, but they are balanced with at least one other complimentary strong or several less-strong-but-still-spicing-up-your-life and with at least two of the other groups as backing — when done well.

Badly made curries, though....those tend to be maladjusted affairs, wherever they come from. Cultural pallets, though, do differ.

I happen to like Indian-Cape Malay fusion. The Cape Malay never lost their touch with the spice even after three centuries, but those two cuisines joined together after years of separate development make for a very hearty hug on a table.

A Cape Malay sweet-spiced-sour mealie pap? In there!

Edited by Euodiachloris on Mar 28th 2020 at 10:46:54 AM

Right, my knowledge of ZA cuisine starts and ends with Nando's, but that sounds pretty fascinating.

South Asian curries are definitely the preference for me.

There's always a balance between when something is a curry and when something is a stew, but I find Japanese, Korean and Chinese curries more in the stew territory than the curry territory.

Don't get me wrong, they all have their place and I like almost every curry I've ever tried. But if I'm in a 'curry mood', it's almost always a South Asian curry that is required to fill that need. If I'm in a 'stew but better' mood, I'll go for one of the others. I feel I should emphasise here just how much I love stew because I don't want this to seem like I'm dismissing Japanese, Chinese and Korean types of curry because I'm definitely not. It's hard for me to find something that's better than stew, but these types of curries do the trick.

There is one exception: While living in Oxford, many years ago, I couldn't eat Thai green curry. I loved the taste of it, but it makes me sick. I could, however, eat Thai red curry.

I was in college when I made this discovery, and one of my flatmates was a girl from Thailand (whom I have to thank for being introduced to fresh, home-made Chrysanthemum tea). We sat there figuring out the differences between the two curries and came to the conclusion that it was the fish sauce — the local Thai red curries were using oyster sauce at the time instead of fish sauce (a difference my flatmate assured me was quite arbitrary and that I should therefore probably stay away from the red curries, too).

And, sure enough, if something has fish sauce in it, I get ill. I can eat fish fine. But not, apparently, fish sauce. Is the problem the fish fermentation? But I have no problem with Worcestershire sauce, which contains fermented anchovies. And fermented anchovies are a common choice for fish sauce.

So... food intolerances. Who'd have 'em, amirite?

Edited by Wyldchyld on Mar 28th 2020 at 12:08:11 PM

Yeah, balance was the wrong word to use, my bad. I think it’s because I usually find actual Indian curry, while also balanced when it’s good, tends to be really rich and abundant in flavor, and I normally can’t eat a lot of that sort of food, or I end up getting sick real fast.