11b. A sample of Indian dishes or maybe not.
Never order anything labelled ‘curry’ in a British ‘Indian’ restaurant. The term is never used that way in India. The word comes from the Tamil word ‘ கறி - kari’ which means sauce or a relish for rice. Generic curry in poorer quality curry restaurants is made by preparing a huge vat of vaguely spicy master gravy (or even buying it in pre-prepared from a factory) which is poured over whichever meat or vegetables the customer requests. Chicken, beef, lamb, prawns*, etc. All taste the same, and it isn’t a good taste. Good restaurants individually match the sauces to the protein and list the dishes by name.
There are many lists of ‘curries’ on the internet, as well as in magazines and newspapers purporting to list curries by mildest to hottest. They all disagree and the reason is very simple – it depends on the chef and restaurant. Where they indicate level of spiciness, the menus disagree, too. Also, the same dish in one restaurant may even look very different from that in another. That said, it is possible to generalise.
Here are a very few dishes from the classic Indian restaurant menu.
‘Kormas’ are always mild, creamy and virtually un-spiced. I have heard them referred to as ‘the curry to order if you don’t like curry’. They are authentically Indian, though, having originated as part of Mughal cuisine in the 16th century in north India and what is now Pakistan.
A popular choice is ‘dhansak’, a dish of meat or prawns cooked with lentils and vegetables Some places in Britain sweeten it with tinned pineapple. If you find that in your dhansak, run! You have entered a palace of debauchery and sin – and not the fun kind! Dhansak is usually classed as medium hot, which when you think about it doesn’t tell you much.
A ‘bhuna’ is a Bengali dish of fried spices (ভাত - bhuna is Bengali for ‘fried’) and meat cooked in its own juices. It originated in the Bangladeshi city of Chittagong. These are usually dry curries and are classed as medium to hot.
‘Dopiaza’ is my favourite. Meaning ‘double onions’, this Hyderabad dish is prepared using onions twice. They appear in the dish’s sauce and also as a garnish. A sour taste is usually added to the dish using tamarind, or in many restaurants, lemon. Again medium to hot.
‘Rogan Josh’ (Urdu: روجن جاش) is a mutton dish from Kashmir in the north of India. It is sometimes erroneously called ‘rogan gosht’. The dish should be a rich red colour, which in Kashmir comes from the local chillies, but in Britain is often achieved using tomatoes and/or red bell peppers. This dish is normally hot.
‘Madras’ dishes have nothing to do with Madras, now known as Chennai, the capital of Tamil Nadu State in south India. This rich and hot dish was invented in Britain by Bengali chefs.
One of the hottest offerings in British Indian restaurants is ‘vindaloo’, which actually originated in Portugal then entered India via Goa, which was a Portuguese colony from 1510 until as recently as 1961. The Portuguese dish, carne de vinha d'alhos, which means ‘meat with wine vinegar and garlic’ was introduced to the area and then adapted by adding local spices. The name, vindaloo is a probably derived from a mishearing or misunderstanding of ‘vinha d'alhos’, which was also confused with ‘आलू - aloo’ the Hindi word for ‘potato’. This probably accounts for the many British restaurants now including potato in the dish. India has one thing to be grateful for though - it was the Portuguese who introduced chillis to the subcontinent.
The hottest dish on British menus is ‘phal’ (which also comes in various alternative spellings). This dish was invented by Bengali chefs in the famous Indian city of Birmingham in England! It was done so to satisfy the drunken idiots who wanted to show off their manly credentials by eating the hottest thing imaginable, no doubt to make up for inadequacies elsewhere. It has nothing to do with India, whatsoever. It is basically meat in a tomato sauce laden with ludicrous amounts of dried chillies, or with samples of the planet’s hottest freak cultivars. The restaurants came to regret coming up with the dish, as I will explain later.
Astute readers and those who know British Indian food better will realise I’ve missed two of Britain’s most famous ‘curries’, including its most popular. Don’t worry, they are coming. They require more elaborate explanation than this brief summary.
* I use ‘prawns’, rather than ‘shrimp’, deliberately. British English differentiates between the two. You will never see what we call shrimp in a British Indian restaurant.
