Curry By Any Other Name

I was in Australia in the late Seventies, when the empire of curry was not fully established there. You could order it in restaurants that had names like Bengal Tiger and Madras Parlour, but trying to cook it at home presented all kinds of difficulties in finding the right ingredients. Australia was slowly changing its culinary character and in ten years or so the supermarket shelves would display the best spices from India and other neighbouring countries. In ten years you could even get frozen drumstick leaves in the supermarkets but in the period that I mentioned the Meat Board advertisement on TV still exhorted the woman to ‘give a man his meat’. In ten years that too would change and the lusty piece of steak that went with the advertisement would become ‘stir-fried beef short-cuts with bean sprouts’.

However, even in those days, Australians were good hosts. A guest from any part of Asia would be treated to a curry or Kerri, as they pronounce it. They may have bought the curry from the take-away shop or valiantly cooked it in the kitchen with whatever ingredients that were at hand.

One of my colleagues at work once announced in the staff room that she had Kerri for dinner for her Indian guest the previous night. I was immediately interested and out of curiosity asked if she had bought the dish from an Indian restaurant. Lydia scorned the question.

‘We cooked it’, she said triumphantly.

“Oh, what curry did you cook?’ I asked, genuinely interested.

‘A real Kerri’, she said, ‘from an Indian cook book we had bought from India’.

‘No, what I meant was what you had put in the curry, chicken or meat?’

‘We are vegetarian’, she said. ‘We don’t eat meat. We cooked a pumpkin Kerri.’

I could see that Lydia was getting annoyed at my questions. She must have felt that I doubted her ability to cook something really Indian. But I was really curious about how she had made a curry because, having moved to that country for an extended visit, I wanted to learn as much as I could about where to shop for spices and the like.

‘We mix our own spices and everything and we use coconut milk’.

I was now really impressed. You can make a good curry without the coconut milk, but adding a measured amount to a curry can really improve the flavour. If Lydia was making curries with coconut milk, I could really learn something from her. ‘Lydia, the coconut milk - did you use powder or milk from a can?’

‘No’ she almost screamed. ‘We got it out of a real coconut we bought from the Asian shop’ in Springvale.

Everyone in the staff room was now listening to the culinary exchange that was going on between the two of us. For me the fact that you could get milk from a real coconut in Australia was giving me a whole new perspective of the country and I wanted to know how Lydia got the milk out of the coconut.

‘Do you grate the coconut or do you just use a blender?’ I asked.

No, she said dismissively. We crack the nut and pour out the milk. Everything else we throw away.

I tried to tell her that what she had used was coconut water. A curry needed the milk that you extracted from the white meaty part inside the coconut. Lydia was however, not interested.

‘That’s how we do it here,’ she said. And that was it.