Curry Leaves

My friend Meredith asked me to write briefly about curry leaves.  I'll try to expand on the Wikipedia entry a bit.

First, if you're in New York and you want to know about curry leaves first-hand, go to Chola. Curry leaves are used in the cookery of my birthplace of Durban, South Africa, but they were an import there, probably brought by the earliest of the indentured servants that came as laborers from the south of the subcontinent.

The iconic curry leaf dish at Chola is the Chettinad chicken.  It's chunks of chicken, with hot chillies, curry leaves, and a highly spiced tomato sauce. Absolutely breathtaking, and not too spicy for normal folks to enjoy.

From the various recipes I've cobbled together, curry leaves seem to have an affinity for tomato and spice. I've never tried them in any sort of fusion capacity, but I'd very much like to experiment a bit.

The taste is, to me, tarry and toasty, both in good ways.  It's very much a warm flavor.  

Enough blathering.  Here's the facts:

• In New York, you can get fresh curry leaves at Dual, and at Little India. I find Little India to be a much better place to shop for actual Indian specialties than the more famous Kalustyan's on the next block.  Kalustyan's is crowded and expensive, with diffident service. Little India and Dual are both friendly and helpful places with reasonable prices.  If you absolutely need to buy Korean black garlic and Welsh smoked salt in the same store, go to Kalustyan's.  If you are interested in cooking, though, I recommend either of these others.
• The wikipedia entry for curry leaves says you can freeze them.  I have frozen them, but have never actually ended up using them, because I make a stop at one of these stores often enough that it's never come up.
• To use them, heat vegetable oil in a heavy pot with a lid.  Meanwhile, rinse the sprig of leaves and shake dry.  When the oil is very hot, strip the sprig into it quickly and put the lid on.  The curry leaves will sputter and can burn you.  When the sputtering starts to subside, go on with your recipe.  This is where you can bloom some curry powder, throw in some onions, garlic, ginger, etc.  The leaves will suffuse the dish with a lovely and somewhat indescribable flavor.
• Most recently, I used curry leaves and hot red chillies in a variation on the Chettinad recipe.  I used whole frozen okra and tofu.  It was heavenly.  You could use just the okra and serve over rice for an awesome vegan curry.
• I was told by the manager at Chola that southern Indian cooking was characterized by the use of curry leaves and coconut.  I wasn't clear if he meant them to be used together.
• I am sort of dying to know if they go well with seafood, particularly shrimp.  I made a Madhur Jaffrey recipe the other night, shrimp with crushed black mustard seeds, that I think might work really well with curry leaves instead of mustard.

Let me know if you know anything more about this lovely seasoning.

Photo credit: ImageBang! on Flickr

Me & JP

I went a few weeks back to see Jacques Pépin speak and sign his new book, More Fast Food My Way, at the the Astor Center.  It was really great.  He had so many memorable things to say:

• The art of cooking is the art of adjustment, and sometimes, the art of recovery. My mom's the expert here.  I've seen her recover so many dishes that I would've given up on.  People got fed, they enjoyed it, and they were never the wiser.
• Never apologize and never explain. A motto he passed on from Julia Child.  At most tables where you're setting down food, you know the most about how the dish should be. This goes double if it's a dish of your own creation. If you keep your self-criticisms to yourself, everyone has a better meal.  If there's a fellow chef at table and you tell an out-and-out lie, a simple wink will suffice to keep them quiet.  They'll expect the same discretion from you when they screw something up, though.  (Again, my mom comes to mind... though she has never told a white lie to make her guests more comfortable, right, Mom? [wink])

I can't overstate how much of an influence this man has been on the way I cook.  I think I'm not alone in saying that he elucidated a way of cooking at home that I had always though of, but hadn't trusted myself enough to do.  He's a great force against pretentiousness in the food world and a national treasure.

 

The Fish Sauce Postulate

The Fish Sauce Postulate:

If a cook is adventurous, the contents of his fridge and pantry will always be crowded with arcane, unused ingredients unless he has,

a.) a good recipe that uses each ingredient, and

b.) a means for reminding himself to cook that recipe regularly.

Call it, "a use for everything and everything in use."

I've recently embarked upon a quest to have a clear use for everything I have in my kitchen.  So far, it's yielding good results.  I try a lot of different recipes and am always experimenting, so there's a constant influx of interesting ingredients.  The fresh ones that don't get used get chucked pretty quickly, but the long-lived ingredients just end up taking up space.  For instance, I picked up some tamarind paste at Dual Quality Products to try out this recipe.  The results where not awesome, but I am totally down with cooking eggplant in the microwave and have done so to good effect since, just not south Indian eggplant.  But I still have that tamarind paste in the fridge.  And unless I get a recipe that uses tamarind paste, it's going to be there until it goes off (a year from now!) and gets thrown out.

So the pantry list is now more of a whole-house food inventory.  I've added all of these recipes to Bubbalup, my organizational tool (forthcoming soon, I promise), and it's working just brilliantly.  I keep black sesame seeds on hand, and every now and then zakkokumai cha zuke will bubble up on my list, ensuring that the sesame seeds have a chance of some day not being in my pantry.

It makes a lot of sense when you think about it.  Of course, I may be totally insane.