The Trouble with Curry

I never used to like curry.  In fact, hearing the word was enough to make my nose try to clamp itself shut and my eyes dart about looking for an escape route, and the actual smell of curry would send me away farther and faster than even the most dire of uttered threats.  So why do I now have three different kinds of curry paste sitting in the fridge?  Because, it turns out, ignorance was not bliss.

One of the disadvantages of growing up in a small town with a fairly negligible number and variety of restaurants (it has improved, though, of late) and in a household where meals out seldom occurred, was simply a lack of exposure to foods outside my family's and neighbourhood's cultural milieu.

I suppose I could romanticize it as a simpler time, but in reality it was simply that certain ingredients weren't available, or were expensive if they were to be had at all.  This was not the marketplace that encouraged experimentation, particularly with dishes that one has only seen in books.  Still, my mother was both an adventurous spirit and an excellent cook within her realm of experience.  Dinner, when asked, was often described as "three-part invention" and if that was too vague an answer, was upgraded to "three-part invention involving (protein of choice)."  Her bread making skills were quite without peer, and the dinners that she put on the table every night were remarkably healthy, balanced, tasty, and varied given our somewhat limited budget.

There were a few dinners that would strike terror into my stomach, though.  Fish fried in wheat germ was one of them, and the other was curry.  You see, my mother only made one kind of curry, and in my ignorance of Asian food, I didn't realize that there were others.  The one that my mother produced, and which is well-liked by some folks, I'm sure, was a bilious yellow with a greenish cast to it, and I have yet to figure out just what the dominant spice was - she used a non-descript commercial curry powder.  I've described it to a few people who recognize it as a particularly English generic interpretation of curry.

What broke my heart about my mother's curry, aside from the fact that perfectly good chicken or turkey was being used in it, were the condiments.  I loved, loved, loved the little bowls of toasted coconut, peanuts, kumquats, raisins, and chutneys.  In fact, my main strategy on curry night, which to be fair occurred only infrequently, was to have a lot of rice, the smallest spoonful possibly of poultry, with as little sauce as possible, and enormous quantities of the accompaniments.  I remember being told that the garnishes were not intended as the meal, but simply to add flavour, to which I saucily replied that this was exactly what I was using them for - to cover up the flavour of the curry.  I didn't win any prizes for my behaviour that night, let me tell you; I suspect I might have been sent to my room without dinner, except that would clearly have been preferable to staying at the table, and was therefore not available as punishment.  I did get a well-deserved scolding, though.

Eventually, in an effort to avoid struggle, my mother caved in to my request that I be allowed to fry an egg for myself instead of having curry, on the condition that I a) did it myself, and b) didn't get in her way while I was doing it and c) refrained from commenting on the food everyone else was eating.  Happy day!  Aside from the smell, I was curry-free from that day hence.

I continued my program of curry-avoidance down to, when I eventually moved to the big bad city, avoiding restaurants that advertised curries a little too prominently.  I remember seeing curry on a restaurant menu and fervently hoping that no one ordered it, because I didn't want to have to endure the smell ever again, thank you very much.

Eventually, it was a potluck that opened my eyes.  My social circle in the early nineties had expanded at that point to include an eccentric photographer who loved to throw potluck dinner parties.  They were an exceptional entertainment, and I was always happy to attend as there would be certain to be a wide assortment of artistic, intellectual and peculiar people in attendance, not to mention a shocking amount of wine.  Nero was a self-consciously gracious host who fell over himself to provide caviar-deviled eggs, disturbing artwork and all manner of gourmet treats for his court.

As is so often the case with potlucks, by the time I was hovering over the available dishes and trying to maximize buffet-impact, who had made what dish and even what some of the dishes were had become something of a mystery.  So I was eyeing the filo-parcels looking for seeped filling to identify the contents, squinting at the inevitable Greek salad to gauge the quality of the olives, steering away from the pickled fish, and nervously checking to make sure that the food that I had brought was disappearing at a respectable rate.  I picked a few things at random and tucked in.

My first bite of the chicken in spicy red sauce just floored me.  I ran around the house like an idiot, trying to find the person who had brought it, only to find her, breathlessly ask what the heck it was, and receive, all arched-browed and surprised sounding, the words "Curried chicken."

I couldn't have been more surprised or disbelieving if she had revealed that it was pickled Yak tongue stuffed with fish.  An entire world, the world of curry avoidance, fell away under those two words.  Nero swanned in on cue and fluttered at me, "Surely you've had curry before!"  I had no other response than "Not like this."  He laughed, and I laughed, and I never revealed my secret.

Not really being a person of half-measures, certainly not where good food is concerned, I immediately flung myself on a remedial study of curry.  How quickly I discovered Indian and Thai food - the former had been firmly on my do-not-approach list as the epicentre of curry production, and the latter was something of a culinary newcomer in the city dining scene.  I discovered, to my additional shock, that I had been eating curries all along at a local African restaurant, but since they weren't described as curry, I ordered them without fear and ate them without knowledge.

I make Thai curries fairly often, with a little help from pre-packaged little plastic envelopes of curry paste in a variety of colours and flavours, a can of coconut milk, and ingredients of the day.  I've developed several Indian-style dal recipes that qualify as curries, and I'm working on some of their meat curries - the only true success I've had so far is with Indonesian Rendang and, most recently, butter chicken.  And I've discovered that a little curry paste goes a long way to add a little pep to everything from pasta or potato salads to a soup that just isn't being all that it can be.

I wish I could have introduced my mother to Thai curries, and some of my favourite Indian curries.  I'm sure she would have been a big fan - much as she was an instant convert to sushi and some of the other things that I did get to share with her.  I'm a little sad that I was such a difficult little jerk about the curry that she did make, even if the memory of the smell alone still makes me cringe, and I wonder if I would still dislike it as much now as I did then.  I wish I hadn't spent years of my life avoiding the very word curry, because I missed out on many a good meal.  But that's all in the past now; I am looking to the future, which is looking spicy indeed.