As Strong As Soup

As part of this year's nostalgic and somewhat bemused review of the food styles and recipes that so far I've neglected in the blog, I got to thinking about classic curries. I've included a couple of time-honoured (or, some might say, hopelessly out-of-date) curry recipes already -  Goat Rogan Josh  and  Lamb Bhuna  - but I couldn't resist adding this one. If you search for Moghlai cooking then you might well find it described as combining ancient traditions of Persian and Indian cooking. I'm sure that's the case but I've derived this dish from the more recent tradition of British curry houses of the 1980s. This is a delicate, rich and fragrant korma that's very characteristic of some of the dishes you'd find being celebrated back then. I've been reasonably faithful to the recipe of the time, but I've reduced the amount of cream a bit. The other change I've made is to use chicken thighs. Back in the 80s, you weren't thought to be makin...

The mention of goat meat will cause many people of my acquaintance to run screaming from the room. I'm not really sure why this is. Goat is a very tasty, lean meat that's well suited to long, gentle cooking, especially in a slow cooker. The first goat dish I bumped into many, many years ago was a Jamaican goat curry and I'm still tempted to make a version of that dish whenever I find good goat meat. But this time I decided to do something a little different after I read that “traditional” rogan josh is often made with goat. This isn't an authentic or traditional rogan josh. My recipe is really a mishmash of the nicest rogan josh dishes that I've eaten in England combined with elements of other slow-cooked curries. The origins of the true, traditional rogan josh seem to be disputed but I favour the idea that the name derives from ratan jot (alkanet root) which was originally used to give the dish a distinct red colour.  Goat meat tends to be very lean but for...

I'm told that ‘bhuna’ means ‘brown’ and refers to the way that this curry is cooked until the colour darkens. In yet another of my shameful fits of nostalgia I'm attempting to recreate a curry that used to turn up on the menus of some of the nicest South London Indian restaurants back in the 1980s when I just happened to be living there. I've come across many bhunas that look and taste nothing like this in the intervening years. To be honest, this is close to the original but not entirely faithful. I think I've toned down my spice craving a bit since the 1980s and I definitely use less oil these days. I imagine that you can still find something like this dish in restaurants somewhere in the country, but it's probably not fancy enough for many London establishments these days. I've checked Google and the place where I first ate this bhuna is now an estate agents. That sums up the recent history of South London rather well I think.  The number of spices h...