At my grandmother’s funeral
recently, my uncle made a speech and during it he mentioned how nana’s cooking
was exclusively old-fashioned traditional English food, and that you wouldn’t
find curry powder or pasta sauce in her cupboards. This is I assume a
generation thing; my recently departed nana was eighty eight, my granddad
ninety. My paternal grandmother Nana Freda is eighty nine, and if he was still
alive her husband, Granddad Eddie would have been ninety. Not a single one of
them would have contemplated eating foreign food, as you just didn’t do that
sort of thing back then. From the age of two I lived in Redcar in the North
East, and at eight years old we relocated to Norfolk, neither of them were
particularly up to date places – it was the 1980s but could have been the
1940s. On the occasions when we ate out, a small glass of orange juice was
considered a starter. My introduction to curry came via tins of chicken curry,
served in the circular nest of rice with a side plate of sliced bananas and
apple. As I said, we weren’t brought up in a cosmopolitan area, the Chinese
takeaway (singular) sold steak and chips and various other English dishes.
I, like my dad, like to eat
hot curry but I am mindful of the fact that what we regard as curry is nothing
like the food eaten in India. I’ve written before about how in England there
are regional variations regarding curry strength; a vindaloo in the North East
is the hot dish whereas in the Midlands it is a Ceylon (not including the phaal
which is just ridiculous). Last time Mandi and I were in London we went to a
curry restaurant and I didn’t know what to have as the food wasn’t labeled to
indicate the hotness. The last thing I wanted to do was ask for something hot as
the chef would have seen it as a challenge to make the ignorant Englishman spend
as much time as possible the next day in the toilet. Old borderline racist
comments such as Gandhi’s revenge were (and maybe still are) prevalent when
talking about curry, along with the half-joking precaution of putting the
toilet roll in the fridge the night before.
My dad cooks curry, very nice
curries, but has had a long standing obsession with cooking a curry that tastes
just like a takeaway. He has asked Indian friends of his, (who of course tell
him that it isn’t authentic) and they have told him how to do it but they have
always been a little off the mark. Last week he asked his newsagent and they
finally told him what he wanted, a WBC. WBC is apparently what Indian chefs
make for us ignorant Englishmen; it stands for ‘White Boy’s Curry’. The WBC is
the most basic sauce imaginable, that you just add the meat of your choice to.
(Note they call it white boy’s curry
and not white man’s curry – patronising and
racist).
Last night we went to my dad’s
for a curry night, and we had WBC and it tasted brilliant. It wasn’t 100% ‘authentic’,
but it was the nearest homemade recreation of a takeaway that we have ever
eaten. It was even the same colour and had the same aftertaste, the only
difference being that it didn’t necessitate spending the rest of the night in
the toilet. Okay, so my morning visit to the toilet this morning stung a
little, but at least I could leave the house in confidence knowing that I was
safe to cough.
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