by Tom Stobart
Red-currant Jelly
Put the fruit in a jar and stand the jar in cold water. Heat gently until the juice begins to flow, then turn the currants into a jelly bag and collect the juice. (Do not squeeze the bag or the jelly will be cloudy.) Allow 1.25 kg (2¾ lb) of sugar per 1 It (1¾ pt) of juice. Warm the sugar and dissolve it in the juice. Boil until the jellying point is reached, and put in jars in the usual way.
Black currant (Ribes nigrum) is a close relative of the red currant and grows wild in northern Europe and Asia. It has increased in importance as a commercial crop since it was found to be rich in vitamin C, but has always been in demand as a medicine for soothing sore throats. It is not very nice raw, but makes delicious jam. In France, black currants are particularly grown in Burgundy, where they are used to make the alcoholic cordial crème de cassis, which is mixed with white wine to make one of the best of all summer aperitifs, vin blanc cassis or kir named after its famous inventor, the Resistance hero, Abbé Kir. Like red currants, black currants are rarely to be seen in any Mediterranean country.
[Currant – French: raisin de Corinthe German: Korinthe Italian: uva passa, uva seca Spanish: uva, paso de Corinto
Red currant – French: groseille rouge German: rote Johannisbeere Italian: ribes ross Spanish: grosella colorada
Black currant – French: cassis German: Johannisbeere Italian: ribes nero Spanish: grosella negra]
CURRY LEAF. This is one of the most important flavourings of Indian vegetarian cooking, but is almost unknown in Europe. The plant is native to southern Asia and grows wild profusely in the forests of the Himalayan foothills. In the Corbett National Park, the smell is overpowering as your elephant bursts through thickets of this plant. The scientific name is Murraya koenigii, and it belongs to the citrus-rue family (Rutaceae). In fact, citrus fruits have even been grafted on to it. To make a typical seasoning for South Indian food, take a good pinch of black mustard seed, a small pinch of asafoetida, and half a dozen curry leaves. Fry these briefly in oil or ghee in a large spoon or ladle, until the mustard seeds start to splutter, then quench the whole in the dish (dal for instance, or a curry of yoghurt with spices).There is no substitute for curry leaves or for this seasoning. Nothing else will give its very special taste, and since a large number of Indians have come to live in Britain, fairly fresh curry leaves can be bought in shops which specialize in Indian foods. If the leaves offered do not smell strongly of curry, do not buy them, as curry leaves quickly lose their virtue. Curry leaf is also used in Malay and Indonesian cooking.
CURRY PASTE. Frying the spices is the most difficult part of making any curry, and when you add to that the undoubted fact that curry improves and matures with keeping, you have one raison d’être for curry pastes. In addition, it is not always possible to get fresh ginger and fresh green chillies – two items necessary for many types of curry and difficult to incorporate in a powder. Many types of curry paste are on the market, but the name of E.P. Veeraswamy is associated with this type of product which, in the past, was necessary to introduce Indian cooking to the West. Anyone who makes curry can easily make curry pastes when fresh ingredients are handy, and, because of the preservative action of spices, it is not difficult to devise formulae which will keep for many months. Easiest, perhaps, is vindaloo paste which contains *vinegar and so keeps without difficulty.
Vindaloo Paste
Use 20-25 g (1 oz) hot red chillies – or double even treble that. Vindaloo should be hot, but chillies vary as do tastes. If they are dried, soak them in ¼ It (½ pt) of vinegar for 3 hours or until soft. Put them in a liquidizer with 20 cloves of garlic and 35 g (1½ oz) fresh ginger, scraped and cut in bits. Liquidize. Grind in a coffee grinder, a pinch of cumin, a big pinch of black mustard seed, 50 g (2 oz) coriander seed, and add to it 5 g (1 teaspoon) ground turmeric. Mix everything to a paste and fry in 1 It (½ pt) of oil for about 10 minutes or until the oil separates. Add a dessertspoon of salt (which helps to preserve it) and bottle when cool enough.
To use the paste, fry an onion, add paste (according to your taste), mix into the fat and fry a moment; then add meat. Fry for a moment more (but do not burn) and then add a little water. Cook till the meat is tender. Adjust the salt.
CURRY POWDER. Curry comes from the Tamil (South Indian) word kari, meaning a sauce. To Europeans, it covers any hot, spicy Indian stew, but in India there are hundreds of dishes that would qualify under this definition, each quite distinct and with its own name. These dishes use varying combinations from a list of two dozen spicy ingredients. Hoping to reduce Indian cooking to ‘curry powder’ is like hoping for a ready-mix ‘cake powder’ to make all European cakes. It can’t be done. Curry powder, in fact, is a European convenience food, invented by Indians for our use, but there is no agreed mixture. Unfortunately, many European recipes call for curry powder, treating it almost as if it were a natural spice or a definite substance. lt is not, so when one reads ‘mijoter dans une bonne sauce currie’ in a recipe for lobster à Ia Créole, one feels that the famous chef who wrote it was leaving much in doubt.
Books commonly say that Indians do not use curry powder. This may have been largely true in the days when even servants had servants. In those days, the masala of fresh ginger, garlic, onion, coconut, green chilli and spices was ground on the stone freshly for each dish. But today, a First-World cost of servants has caught up with Third-World households, and ready-ground convenience spice mixtures are no longer beyond the pale. However, they do not so much use ‘curry powder’ as a variety of mixtures (which they may have formulated and have had specially ground in the bazar), including traditional garam masalas (hot mixtures), but also powders for particular types of curry: sambar, kolumbu, rasam or dhansak masala, to name but a few, and the mixtures are always fresh.
Alerted to the fact that curry powders are not standard, cooks have a wide choice of what they will use in recipes. Trial is the only way to choose. The chef has expressed no opinion, so we are back to the cook’s personal taste. When choosing a recipe for home-made curry powder (and all serious cooks make their own), keep the following points in mind. One may want to vary the hotness, and a light hand with the chilli in the powder and a jar of pure chilli powder on the shelf enables any degree of hotness to be achieved. Turmeric makes curries yellow but does not necessarily have to go into them. Although it is not very spicy, its taste is assertive, penetrating and rather banal. It is best not to overdo it. Fenugreek can also very easily be overdone, and its flavour gets stronger with time. Cumin is a taste some people do not like, especially if it is rank because it has not been properly roasted. Ginger makes you sweat. Some do not like the taste of dried ginger very much and others, often those who tolerate chilli, find its peculiar hotness overpowering. In India, ginger in curries is usually fresh and thus has a kinder taste. Volatile, oily spices, such as cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and mace are needed, particularly in powders for very aromatic meat curries or as a flavouring for raw or lightly-cooked dishes, such as stuffed eggs and sauces, but for best results curry powders should be fried a little (not burned), and it is worth making up your own *curry pastes and bottling them. There are also many ready-made pastes.
The spices most commonly used in curry powders are dealt with separately in this book. They are: chilli, turmeric, ginger, coriander, cumin (black and white) fenugreek, cloves, cinnamon, cardamom, mace, black pepper, mustard, asafoetida, cassia leaves, curry leaves, poppy seeds and various dals. Other spices, such as ajowan, pomegranate seeds, kalonji, anise and mango powder are used for special purposes. Curries from further south and east may include zedoary, lemon grass, galangal and other less-known ingredients.
Making curry powder at home. Before grinding, certain whole spices should be roasted, an operation which has to be learned by experience. Roasting partly dries the spice and helps to develop and change the flavour. It is done in a dry pan (such as an old iron frying-pan) on top of the stove, and the spice must be stirred and lifted constantly to prevent burning. Whole dry chillie
s may be roasted in a cool oven. Each spice should be roasted separately and receive individual attention. Chillies should be brittle, but not burned. Coriander seed should be heated slowly until it gives off a lovely orange scent and is just too hot to touch comfortably. If it is not roasted and dried long enough, it will be difficult to grind. Cumin is roasted until the crude smell disappears and the aroma becomes slightly nutty. The colour taken is very slight. Black peppercorns are roasted a little, just until they begin to smell. Most tricky of all is fenugreek seed which must just begin to colour a brown-yellow; if it is roasted too much, so that it starts to turn red, the spice becomes impossibly bitter. The more volatile and oily spices such as cloves, cinnamon, cardamom and mace are not usually roasted, but some recipes call for roasting various dals as well as mustard seeds and asafoetida. Dals go biscuit coloured and develop special tastes necessary to the background in vegetarian curries. Mustard seeds lose their ability to produce hot flavours with water and develop a nutty taste when roasted until they splutter (the enzymes are destroyed). Asafoetida mellows but should be heated very little or it will lose its special flavour.
Spices are easily ground in a small whirling-blade electric coffee grinder. The exceptions are ginger and turmeric which are the better for a preliminary bashing with a hammer, as they are apt to break the blades of the mill. Thus, roast and grind the whole spices separately, sieve them into a bowl (grinding the residue, if there is any, a second time) and then mix well together. Pack the powder immediately into bottles, excluding as much air as possible, and seal. Exposure to air destroys flavour, or it is lost into the atmosphere. Damp also destroys curry powder.
Curry Powder Formulae
The thirteen formulae given on page 135 are from my book Herbs, Spices and Flavourings (Grub Street). They give some idea of the enormous variations possible in curry powder recipes. The numbers indicate parts by weight.
[Curry powder – French: poudre de curry German: indisches Ragoutpulver Italian: polvere di curry Spanish: cari]
CURUBA. See passion fruit.
CUSTARD APPLE is an American tropical fruit of the family Anonaceae, which is represented in the temperate zone only by the *papaw from the US. The other edible fruits of this family are rarely seen outside the tropics; some have been cultivated in tropical Asia as well as America. They are multiple fruits made up of many divisions, each containing a seed, and vary in taste from acid to sweet. One of the most acid is the Sour sop (Anona muricata), which is also the largest – its fruits, which are green and have rows of spines, typically weigh up to 2.7 kg (6 lb) and may reach 3.6 kg (8 lb);they are popular in Cuba, where they are used to make drinks and ices. The Sweet sop or Sugar apple (A. squamosa) is also popular in the Caribbean and is the one which you are most likely to find being referred to simply as the custard apple. It is eaten as a fruit as well as being used as pulp in drinks and ices. Sweet sops are picked when they are firm but after the skin between the segments has turned creamy yellow; they are kept in straw for a few days until they are soft, with rather custard-like flesh. In this state, they must be handled with great care – they are difficult to transport over any distance. Bullock’s heart or ramphal (A. reticulata) has more solid and granular flesh and can be heart-shaped and reddish brown or buff. The cherimoya (A. cherimolia) has a scaly surface and a flavour not unlike pineapple; it is a species of tropical highlands, while the similar ilama (A. diversifolia) grows in lowland areas. The soncoya (A. purpurea) has particularly large fruit and is restricted to Mexico and Central America.
CUSTARD MARROW. See chayote.
CUSTARD POWDER. One of the first ready-mix convenience foods was custard powder. Invented by Birds in 1846, it became a standard food of school and nursery. It is cheap, being made of cornflour with dye, salt and flavourings, but the exact composition is a trade secret. Combined with hot milk, it is meant to produce an approximation to real custard, which is made with eggs and milk. The word custard or custade is a corruption of ‘crustade’, meaning a pie with a crust.
[Custard powder – French: poudre à flan German: Puddingpulver]
CUTCH. See catechu.
CUTTING IN. In making pastry, it was once usual to rub the fat lightly into the flour with the fingers, an operation which needed cold hands and a sensitive touch. These days, it is more usual to cut the fat into the flour, using two knives, one knife, a pastry blender, blending fork or other device, according to the skill and taste of the pastry-maker, but the newer food processors such as the Magi-Mix do the job superlatively even for the novice. Light pastry can thus be made by the hot and heavy handed.
CUTTLEFISH. Cuttles are *cephalopods with a stiffening ‘bone’, a familiar white porous object which is washed up on beaches and used to provide grit for cage-birds. The living cuttle is a free-swimming, savage animal with eight arms and two tentacles. The latter are kept retracted ready to shoot out and grab the prey. Living cuttlefish should be handled with care – they bite if given a chance, as a rather important lady, who once picked up one I had speared, discovered to her cost. The common cuttlefish of Europe (Sepzia officinalis) is 30-40 cm (12-16 in) long but is best at 25 cm (10 in).The smaller Sepia elegans is only 20 cm (8 in) long, but only people in places like Naples will be able to tell the species apart. The very tiny seppiola (Sepiala rondoleti), only 3-6 cm (1¼-2½ in) long, is commonly seen in Mediterranean fish markets. Very often seppiole are mixed with the young of the larger species, which are even better, being very tender. The seppiole have fins like little ears sticking out at the sides, but the tender young have fins running almost from end to end.
To prepare cuttlefish, first make a slit in one end and remove the bone through the slit. Turn the animal inside out and remove the guts (reserving the ink sac if needed). Cut off the head and remove the parrot-like beak. Skin the cuttlefish and wash it well before cooking. The body is the best part and is very often stuffed, but cuttles are in general inferior to squids.
[Cuttlefish – French: seiche German: Tintenfisch, gemeine Sepie Italian: seppia Spanish: jibia]
CYANOCOBALAMIN. See vitamin B12.
CYCLAMATES. In the 1960s sodium and calcium cyclamate were much used as artificial sweeteners in soft drinks, ice-cream and food products generally. They are about thirty times as sweet as ordinary sugar, are not fattening and do not have the unpleasant lingering sweetness and bitterness of *saccharine. During 1969 and 1970, they were removed from the permitted lists of many countries, when American tests showed that artificial sweetening mixtures of cyclamates and saccharine caused a significant increase in bladder cancer when fed to rats. Some people have said that the scare over artificial sweeteners was promoted by sugar interests, that the amount of cyclamates consumed even by American children in soft drinks was insignificant, that in any case the bladder cancer was provoked in rats and not in humans. Others have said that the harm was done by impurities and not by the substance itself.
CYMLING. See marrow.
d
DAB. See flatfish.
DAIKON. See radish.
DAL, dhal or dholl is the Indian term for a split gram of any kind, including split lentils. In Central and South India, the gram is soaked and re-dried before it is split, which is economical because it gives a maximum yield of clean, whole grains. In North India, Gujarat and Maharashtra, the gram is not soaked before splitting. This method leaves more waste and makes the dal more expensive, but the flavour is better. Such dal is always smooth on the outer (curved) face, but wet-split dal has the face rather flattened, with a depression in the middle due to shrinkage. Good dal is all of one colour, with few bits, husks or shrivelled grains. It should also be free from rogue seeds and stones, though for safety it is always a good idea to spread the dal out and pick it over. Dal stored for long is prone to attack by weevils.
Dal cooks best in soft water, without salt (which is added at the end) and without prior soaking. It is soaked only when it is to be ground raw to a paste, as for some Indian preparations (e.g. dosas and idlis
). Dal is vital in Indian cooking and in the cooking of the South East Asian countries, not only because it is the main source of protein for many people – and almost the only one for some poor vegetarians – but also because it is the basis on which many vegetarian flavours are created (it is even the basis for sweet dishes). For this reason, it is important to use the type specified in the recipe, as the dals are very different, and it will frequently spoil or change the dish if you try to use substitutes without knowing what you are doing. The types of dal are best called by their Indian names; even when they are varieties of species well known elsewhere, they are often rather different.