The Hirshon British Indian Restaurant Madras Curry

My Citizens, I am honored to share your journey as you follow my lead – like Dante walking in the steps of Virgil – into the subtleties of preparing British Indian Restaurant (BIR) curries! We have already learned how to make the mandatory curry base and the deadly phall – the most lethally spicy curry on the planet! – and now we move on to the middle-of-the-road Madras Curry! 🙂

Madras curry or Madras sauce is a fairly hot curry sauce, red in color and said to have originated from the south of India. It received its name from the city known as Madras when English merchants arrived there in 1640 (now Chennai).

However, the name ‘Madras Curry’ is not used in India, but was actually invented by restaurants in Britain. The spicy Madras curry served in British restaurants is quite different from authentic Madras curries, with the British variation originating from British Bangladeshi restaurants in the 1970s.

Learning to achieve that proper BIR flavor is what this series is all about, and you can do no better than to start with this tutorial – it is authentic in every way! 🙂

Madras curry powder is not an Indian spice blend, although it does use Indian ingredients. It is a formulation of ingredients designed to suit English tastes and differs significantly from the spice blends used in Madras. My version of this curry powder is almost exactly based on one I found at food52.com, although I have made a few small tweaks.

As noted in an interesting article on Quartz India:

Victorian cookbooks served a particularly important purpose in the colonisation process. Susan Zlotnick, in a fantastic essay, describes how the cookbook became the way India was assimilated into the Empire. British women were given the task of bringing imperialism home in an easy-to-swallow manner.

They used the medium of cookbooks and “incorporated Indian food, which functioned metonymically for India, into the national diet and made it culturally British”.

Acton does this quite clearly in her Modern Cookery for Private Families. She begins by bemoaning how English food is “far inferior to that of nations much less advanced in civilisation”, and thus provides easy curry recipes to make it more exciting.

The key to making curry for her is “curry powder”—a British concoction that blends large amounts of turmeric with mainly cumin, chilli and fenugreek, and has little resemblance to anything you would get in India.

All of Acton’s dishes use it—a curry powder-infused mulligatawny soup, which she says is “much recommended by persons who have been long resident in India”, veal cutlets à l’Indienne that are to “have a good currie sauce ready prepared to send to the table” and fried chicken à la Malabar, which is fried chicken coated in—you guessed it—curry powder.

This use of curry powder as the ingredient that makes a dish Indian is a common feature in many other British recipes of the time. The bestselling Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1888) uses this strategy to make curried beef. An Indian recipe from a Victorian manor in 1890, discovered in early 2015 at the East Riding College, reveals the same idea—chopped onions, lamb and a heap of curry powder.

Subsequently, by the time the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, curry and curry powder became established signifiers for Indian food, but on entirely British terms.

Walk into a grocery store in India and you find that the singular curry powder does not exist, neither as material nor idea. In India, we use endless varieties of spice mixes instead. Uma Narayanan writes that British curry powder replaced varied local masalas and distinctive eating cultures and fabricated a homogenous notion of Indian food, in much the same way that the British rule fabricated a unified India.

Citizens, while this Madras curry can be quickly made once you have prepared all the spice powders, you will have to take some time – just once! – to make these spice blends. You can store them afterwards and make this recipe in a flash!

You can buy excellent ghee here, Kashmiri chili powder here, whole Kashmiri chilis here, fresh curry leaves here, dried fenugreek leaves here, Maharaja-style curry powder here, and Ceylon cinnamon sticks here. This recipe is also a bit unusual in that it calls for sweet and sour Mango Chutney in the curry itself – another Anglicized change to the classic Indian Madras recipe.

This is one of my all-time favorite BIR curries, Citizens! Just grab some naan from the grocery store, freeze the curry base and you can easily whip this up anytime you’re in the mood for a proper curry feast!

Battle on – the Generalissimo

The Hirshon British Indian Restaurant Madras Curry

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Ingredients

Units USM Scale 1x2x3x

• 3 1/4 cups pre-cooked boneless meat (TFD prefers chicken breast, but thigh is more traditional)
• 2 Tbsp. ghee (clarified butter)
• 5 green cardamom pods, outer husks removed
• 1 Tbsp. garlic paste
• 1 Tbsp. ginger paste
• 4 Tbsp. tomato paste
• 2 green jalapeño peppers, de-seeded and finely chopped
• ***
• 1 1/2 tsp. Indian restaurant spice mix made from:
• 4 Tbsp. coriander powder
• 2 Tbsp. cumin powder
• 4 Tbsp. turmeric powder
• 3 Tbsp. paprika
• 2 Tbsp. mild curry powder
• 1 tsp. Kashmiri chili powder
• 1 tsp. garam masala
• 1 tsp. coarse-cracked black pepper
• ***
• 2 tsp. hot madras curry powder (or more to taste), made from:
• 2 Tbsp. whole coriander seeds
• 1 Tbsp. whole cumin seeds
• 1 tsp. powdered fenugreek
• 3-inch piece Ceylon Cinnamon bark
• 12 whole green cardamom pods, outer pods removed
• 1 tsp. whole black pepper
• 5 Kashmiri chiles, dried
• 25 small fresh (not dried) curry leaves
• 2 Tbsp. ground turmeric
• ***
• 1 tsp. Kashmiri chili powder
• 1/2 tsp. kasoor methi – dried fenugreek leaves
• 1/2 tsp. kosher salt
• ***
• 3 cups heated curry base sauce
• 1 Tbsp. coconut milk (or more to your taste)
• 1 tsp. fresh lemon juice
• ***
• 3 Tbsp. mango chutney
• Fresh coriander to garnish
• A pinch of garam masala to garnish
• Naan bread

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Instructions

1. Make the spice mix and the Madras curry powder.
2. For the Madras curry powder:
3. Toast the first 7 spices, one at a time, in a hot, heavy pan until fragrant. This can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 1 minute per spice. Place each in the same bowl and let them cool completely.
4. To toast curry leaves, place in the same hot pan. Shake the pan to crisp up and toast the leaves, about 1 minute. When they are fragrant, brown around the edges, and crumbly, remove them from the pan and let cool in the bowl.
5. Place the toasted spices, curry leaves, and ground turmeric in a spice grinder and grind to a fine powder. Sieve if necessary.
6. Dilute the tomato paste with enough water to get to the consistency of thick tomato juice and reserve.
7. Heat the curry base to warm in a separate pot and reserve.
8. Heat your frying pan (don’t use non-stick) briefly over medium heat. Add the ghee.
9. When the ghee starts to shimmer add the garlic ginger paste, the minced jalapeño and the cardamom pods. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture stops sputtering.
10. Turn down the heat and add the Indian spice mix, the Madras curry powder and all the remaining powdered spices – this is the critical step. Stir it constantly for 30 seconds. If it starts to darken, lift the pan off the heat. You want the spice mix to cook in the oil but not burn.
11. Turn the heat up to medium high. This is important. The heat is what caramelizes the onions in the curry base and gives the curry its Indian restaurant flavor.
12. Add the diluted tomato paste and stir until bubbles form (the oil will likely separate). This takes around 30 seconds to one minute depending on the heat.
13. Add 3 oz. of curry base. Stir until bubbles form (little craters really), around 30 seconds. Think lively boil. Watch the edges of the pan. The curry can stick here. Sticking is OK. Just scrape it back into the base. Burning is bad.
14. Now add 6 oz. of curry base and stir briefly. Let it cook until the bubbles form again. This takes 1-2 minutes.
15. Add the rest of the curry base and let it cook until the bubbles form. Add the lemon juice, mango chutney and coconut milk. Turn the heat down to low and add the pre-cooked chicken.
16. Let the curry simmer for about 5 minutes. If it gets too thick, add a bit more curry base. Don’t add water. Taste and adjust heat levels to your preference – it should be spicy but not devastatingly so.
17. Garnish with a bit of chopped fresh cilantro and a bit of garam masala and serve with naan bread.

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