Welcome to Curry Nation and belated Happy Birthday Rakesh!
I decided to splash out on a new recipe book last Christmas as my packers packed all my recipe books by mistake on 4 December . One of the books on my Christmas list was Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation – Britain’s 100 favourite curries. So that explains why my house smelled of curry, whoever moved in after me!
On 3rd January we celebrated the 22nd Birthday of our Janitor Rakesh. So I got him to choose his favourite 3 dishes from the book . Then I selected some vegetarian curries for my Gujarat friends over the road, and a Keralite fish curry for my Gardener for the last 11 years in Bahrain, Shji. Anis has been my nephew for 11 yrs and so I made him some Lahore Lamb Biryani. I just wanted to thank them all the best way I know how for all their kindness over the last 11 years.
As well as being a recipe book it starts with some fascinating facts about the growth of curry in the UK, which I wanted to share with you before I share the three recipes Rakesh selected for me to make for him.
Did you know that the first Indian restaurant in the UK was The Hindustani Coffee House in George Street, London in the early Nineteenth Century? It went out of business two short years later as it could not entice enough customers.
(Jaffrey, 2012).
Now in the UK there are 10,000 Indian restaurants employing 80,000 staff making the industry worth 3 Billion GBP! That is some growth! It now accounts for two thirds of all people who dine out in the UK. But that is not the whole picture! Indian food sales from Supermarkets account for 600 million pounds a year. Many years ago, a former blue-sky thinking boss of mine who worked for predicted that their stores would sell take away curries. Back then people dismissed his Radical “plant” thinking and said “Kevin, if people want a curry, they will go to a curry house”. He explained that in 2020 with both parents working people would not have time to eat out or cook at home and would simply collect their curry from the supermarket on the way home. How right he was!
So popular has curry become in the UK that former Foreign secretary, Robin Cook, declared that Chicken Tikka Masala was more popular than Fish and Chips. A pub chain in the UK, Wetherspoons, now sells 15,000 servings of Chicken Tikka Masala a WEEK! Up market UK Retailer Marks & Spencer sells 18 tonnes of it a week. Apparently if all the Chicken Tikka served in Britain in one year was piled up it would form a tower 2,270 times taller than the Millennium Dome!
Source: Jaffrey, M 2021: Madhur Jaffrey’s Curry Nation, Britain’s 100 favourite curries. London: Ebury Press.
So here are the three recipes I made for Rakesh:
Hot Punjabi Prawn Curry
Next up he wanted ice cream- only the second time I have made ice cream in my life! The book contains a recipe for Almond and Cardamom Kulfi, and having heard my ex boss rave about Kulfi I thought I would give it a try.
It is actually really easy- you whisk double cream and add evaporated and condensed milk, crushed almonds and cardamom and freeze in individual cups
Finally Rakesh selected a Chicken dish- Dhora Kebabs, which I prepared with Corleen's help in the week. Again these are easy to make - you just mix the chicken, breadcrumbs, garlic, ginger, coriander, eggs and salt into a sticky dough. Then you ( or rather Corleen ) make the dough into 30 golf balls , flatten them and deep fry them. They are best served with home made coconut chutney.
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Hello, I am The British Kabayan! Feel free to read my stories.
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