Curry Cooking Influences

I don't know at which point I decided to start making curries, but age wise I can place it at probably around the 18-20 years of age. My first "mentor" was Harvey Day, for no other reason than, in the 1970s, the number of cookery books available was limited. With Harvey Day's Complete Book of Curries, I thought that I had struck gold. "Complete, yes that's exactly what I need, nothing basic, complete, the full caboodle, from start to finish, comprehensive with no stones left unturned."

Unfortunately this book didn't quite match my expectations. It contained a hotchpotch of information, written in the 1950s and 1960s and contained recipes from who knows where. Some were certainly submitted by housewives and the impression was off someone who had dabbled here and there and perhaps grown up in a household, with servants, in India during the days of the Raj. The biggest thing was that this book was old fashioned. I did not get the impression that this was a book drawn from experience. I wondered if he had even cooked any of these recipes.

What it did do however, was satisfy my urge to make a home cooked curry. I still have this book and I note that have put asterisks against recipes I tried at the time and thought were worth repeating. I can remember enjoying, for the first time, homemade chapattis with a home cooked curry sauce to dip them in.

I now know of course, that the majority of books on Indian cookery at that time were recipes for home style family dishes. Indeed, it could be said that the majority of books on Indian cookery are still describing home cookery albeit that current names like Anjum Anand do so with a more modern twist catering for western palates.

I persevered with this book for several years before coming across my next, and probably most important influence, Pat Chapman. Now Pat, in my opinion, should be regarded as a curry cooking legend. How I came to know about him, I am not sure, but his books Indian Restaurant Cookery, Favourite Restaurant Curries and Pat Chapman's Curry Bible are in my opinion seminal texts that all self-respecting curryistas should have read. With the 1984 Indian Restaurant Curries, Pat, for the first time to my knowledge, articulated recipes that were aimed squarely at those with a passion for the kinds of meals served in your local curry house. There were lots of Indian cookery books around even then but this book seemed to be the first that attempted to capture "that restaurant flavour".

In addition, it was almost subliminal advertising for his curry club, because if you couldn't source the spices for say, the Chicken Dupiaza recipe, then you could buy a spice pack directly from the club. Along with membership of the club, this book was my first foray into curry cookery as I imagined it should be.

Reading the introduction now, over 25 years later, his description on what goes on behind the scenes in an Indian takeaway kitchen seems somewhat dated. As I understand it Pat has travelled widely whilst researching his books but this book seems to lack experience of the Indian restaurant kitchens that cook the dishes we love. It makes reference to a "curry gravy" (base) but suggests they are made with powdered garlic and ginger rather than the real thing. It provides recipes a Pakistani Curry Gravy and a Savoury Curry Gravy but doesn't guide the reader if they are to be used in isolation or if they are part of an overall method. One is left feeling that the book is part experience and part guesswork. So, although not quite fulfilling its promise of leaving most Indian restaurants at the starting gate, this book is still, in my opinion, a landmark text because it is the first of its kind and it does contain some recipes which produce great meals, only they are not what goes on in an Indian restaurant.

Pat's next book, Favourite Restaurant Curries can be seen as a sequel to Indian Restaurant Curries in that it covered lots of similar dishes. It also attempted to articulate how a restaurant could offer dozens of recipes by starting off with a base gravy and merely adding different spices to individualise a dish. The previous book had, by and large, shown the reader how to cook one-off curries. However Favourite Restaurant Curries was far from being fully developed. It only hinted at how this would work in practice and Pat's recipes were probably too complicated to give the reader real insight into how to truly clone the dishes of the average local takeaway.

Latterly Pat produced The Curry Bible, a book which targets the sixteen curries most common to the Indian restaurant menu along with sixteen "house favourites". This time he included one-off recipes alongside the restaurant style equivalent which brought the book another step closer to restaurant methods of cooking albeit still short of offering the reader a coherent system. Having said that I still use Pat's recipe for Tandoori Masala in my Lamb or Chicken Tikka and so his Curry Bible remains for me a splendid reference text.

During all of this time, Pat's curry club was responsible for a monthly magazine with reader and restaurant submitted recipes sitting alongside culinary holidays and adverts for Pat's latest book. The one-off curry still predominated. Things changed when a series of articles by Bruce Edwards called Curry House Cookery was first published The Curry Club Magazine in 1990. They have since become seen by British curry cooking fanatics as being a landmark text which gave real insight in how to reproduce a curry house dish with a high level of professionalism.

These articles were largely a reflection of Bruce's single-handed experimentation, but at that time he still felt there was a gap in the quality of his dishes and those of his favourite takeaway. Subsequently, in 1993 he produced Curry House Cookery An Update. This time, he was able to expand his knowledge, having been allowed into the kitchen of his regular takeaway. The result was a 28 page essential guide for the curry enthusiast. You could read this text alone and produce high quality curries without ever having to read anything else. Indeed for the purposes of this book we will draw to a great extent on Bruce Edwards' recipes because they are simple and they work.

In 2008, Bruce contributed a couple of articles to the web based forum Curry Recipes Online where he again updated and simplified his curry base recipe and wrote in more detail about what goes on during the actual process of cooking a restaurant curry.