My first taste of how good curry can be.
Since I grew up in the Middle East, curry was pretty much all I ate. In 1962, when I first remember it, I was eating curry goat in the fire station of Dubai Airport. My dad ran the airport, and the Chief Fire Officer and his family lived close by and were good friends. The firemen made food for our two families. The adults had fiery hot curry, and the kids had a much milder version. Some of the men were from the Middle East and some were from India, so I think the food was a bit of a mix.
I remember that chairs and forks were offered to us, but we chose to sit on the floor and eat with our right hands, as was the custom. My mother was left-handed, so this was a bit of a problem for her. To avoid making a terrible mistake, she sat on her left hand until the meal was over.
We learned to roll balls of rice and use chapattis, which are flatbreads made from wheat flour, to pick up curry and put it in our mouths without making too much of a mess. I don't think I ever ate curry that way again until I went to Goa and ate at a spice plantation that only used banana leaf plates and fingers. This was many years later. In a nearby clearing, there was a strange pink porcelain pedestal sink with a hose pipe attached to the tap and soap and hand towels in the sink.
When the British were living in other countries, they started to like having curry for Sunday lunch. During the time of the Raj, this most likely came from India, but it still made its way to the Middle East and Africa. Friends would get together at one of their homes or at a club in the area. The first drinks would be beer or gin and tonic (cola or fizzy orange for the kids). I don't remember having a choice of curries. It was always chicken, and it always tasted the same no matter where we ate it. Even the background music didn't change much, but we didn't mind. There would be poppadoms, mango chutney, and a variety of sambals, which are chopped fruits and salad ingredients. These might include banana, pineapple, apple, tomato, cucumber, onion, desiccated coconut, peanuts, and raisins or sultanas. If we were lucky, there would also be chapattis.
The next time I ate curry, I was back in England. Everything was so different. Indian restaurants have gold-flocked red velvet furniture and red velvet walls. There are many different kinds of curry, both in terms of the main ingredient and the mix of spices and seasonings. There were plain or spicy poppadoms, different kinds of bread, vegetable curries and dahls, but there were no sambals. On the other hand, these curries were often very greasy, and we always thought they were very fattening. They were bad, but they were so good! Tandoori-cooked meats saved us if our morals got the best of us. These were marinated in yoghurt and spice paste and cooked in a Tandoor, which is an earthenware charcoal oven. This is a lot healthier than grilling.
Then, when I finally went to India in 1988, I found that meat curries were more of an exception than the norm. Many Indians are vegetarian, so dishes like paneer, which is similar to cottage cheese, and those made with pulses and vegetables are popular. There was none of the grease that you find in restaurants in the UK, and the tastes were also very different.
This journey of discovery led me to want to learn how to make Indian food at home, but I'll talk more about that in a different article.
