March 22, 2004

The York Atmospheric Chemistry Club's Curry House Review.
posted by tracicle 20 years ago
  • Can someone help an American understand what seems to be a UK obsession with curries? I don't get it.
  • This is all very well, and apparently sound as far as it goes, but I think we really need a bit of detail.
  • I thought it was fairly self-explanatory. As for the love of curry I don't really get it either, although I do, admittedly, love me a good curry. It's more fish n' chips in NZ, but the trend toward upmarket curry restaurants is greater than it used to be.
  • Curry really pissed me off in the UK - not that there's anything wrong with curry, and I usually have one a week with mates at a regaulr lunch. But when I was working outside Birmingham, it was a cuisine monoculture. Curry, curry, and more fucking curry. What shall we have if we go out tonght? A curry and lager? Or lager and curry? How about just curry then?
  • No reflection intended on the post (which deserves a banana dusted in garam masala and lightly flamb
  • Very nifty! It's a shame (from a scientific standpoint, natch) that this group hasn't visited any truly horrible curry houses. Bad reviews tend to be the most entertaining.
  • What does 'curry' mean?
  • It's something you do to a function, partially applying the function over a subset of its arguments to yield a new function subsuming the previous arguments' values. /geek
  • doesn't the UK obsession with curries linger on from ye olde empire days?
  • Anyone?
  • Gyan: Curry is a spicy stew eaten by English people with spices which may have been grown in India. (Now you're going to say that you knew that all along, and were just teasing us :). How would you define curry? Actually, I've had curry from places in Toronto that cater primarily to ex-pat South Asians, and the curries seemed nonetheless similar to English curry houses (which are, after all, mostly run by South Asian people). Or maybe I was just in a really cheap lunch place, which bore the same resemblance to South Asian food as McDonald's does to a roast and potatoes.
  • Oops - kind of repeditive on the word "spice" there - meant to emphasize the flavouring, rather than the heat. Actually, I found that in general the spice and herb selection in British stores much better than Canadian, unless you go to an Indian grocers, of course. (But then you have to buy all the spices separately, and figure out how to mix them, and convince your mother that half a pound of tumeric will get used up in no time.)
  • PS - British restaurant prices scare the bejeebies out of me. 13 pounds for dinner? I rarely spend more than 10 US. When will the British finally stage a revolution for cheap food?
  • jb: Curry is a spicy stew eaten by English people with spices which may have been grown in India. (Now you're going to say that you knew that all along, and were just teasing us :). How would you define curry? Here's my cue. I'm apalled at the blatant abuse of the word 'curry'. Curry is strictly speaking, only for dals, which are lentil-based curries. Indian "curries" in Britain are called sabji, which doesn't translate to curry.
  • What about the kind of curry where meat, potatoes and spicy paste are first fried, the coconut milk and water are added to stew? Here, that's curry. We call the lentil-based stews dhal here, and the meat or fish based stews curry. And we also have curry powder or paste, which are pulverised spices mixed into the appropriate form for easy cooking.
  • A little off-topic here. Has anyone ever tried Japanese curry? It's sweet. It has apples. Sometimes called Vermont curry. There's hardly any spicy taste to the gravy, which is just like brown sauce, if brown sauce had chunks of potatoes, carrot and meat chunks bobbing in it. I love it.
  • While I really like the "look" and "feel" of the site (20 years ago by mexican
  • Alnedra, what you're probably talking about is Vermont Curry, made by House Foods. The stuff with apples in it is mainly for little kids, although it's not too dissimilar from regular Japanese curry. Regular Japanese curry is usually thicker than Indian curry, brown, has meat, and is quite spicy depending on where you go. It is almost always eaten on top of or next to white rice.
  • In Thailand, curry base (prik gaeng) is a paste of spices: garlic, magrood, galanga, shrimp paste, salt, peppers, etc. Pretty much any runny, wet food seemingly gets called curry (gaeng), whether made with curry paste or not: e.g., clear light broth is gaeng juud or "bland curry." If the dish uses a curry base but doesn't add coconut milk or water, it's a dry curry or juujii.
  • This thread is making my mouth water. In Australia, "doing a curry" generally involves the Thai version. Lot of good North Indian-style food around too. (As long as we're talking about nice curries.) Brit prices for food are obscene. And the shit is dead, because it's come from a Euro-mandated warehouse somewhere where it was frozen and the life sucked out of it as per regulation. Er, eat fresh or die.
  • Mexican: Right on the money. Love that stuff, but my mom hates it. *sigh*. Which results in me getting weird looks when I drag friends to a Japanese restaurant so I can eat curry. In most restaurants, the rice comes separately on a plate, while the curry comes in a gravy boat. And then you pour.... *Cue first verse of "Dancing Cheek to Cheek".*
  • Aaarrrggggghhhhh!!!!! It's midnight! No way to quench this sudden, desperate need for curry!!!! Damn you all! BTW, if your ever in Vancouver, Canada.....you'll be hard pressed to find ANY bad curry. At least that's been my experience. Fortunately, I live only an hour and half away, in the States. Okay, so, for tomorrow night, can we talk about sushi?
  • Sushi, sushi, yeah!
  • Gyan:: In which areas of India are the words curry and sabji used that way? I am very eager to learn more about Indian cooking. I had a friend from Delhi tell me that "curry" just generally meant a stew, but maybe she was being vague, or was already translating into English for me.
  • I'm appalled at the blatant abuse of the word 'curry'. I thought curry was an English word, not a Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi or Gujarati one. I'm-a calling Gyan out for faux-culinary-vocabularic-snobberyism! And Sabji/sabzi was Urdu for "vegetables", I thought ...
  • This comment and (the rest of the thread) on Ask Metafilter gives a good background on actual Indian cooking, as opposed to British curries.
  • the q kid: draw your weapons! 20 courses apart! Well, you've it right. Sabji means vegatables and 'vegetables' is what we call them in English, within India. We use 'curry' to translate 'dal'.
  • Gyan: Do you mean that you use "curry" in English to refer to dal? I think the English just call the lentil dish dal. Please forgive the ignorant questions, but I know little about Indian languages. Which language is dal from? Is "curry" used in any Indian language?
  • i thought curry powder was a mix of coriander, cumin and hot pepper? i use those ingredients in my own combination, rather than the premix. so a curry is a dish made with those ingredients as the primary flavour....i.e. lamb, beef, pork, veg,... but the brits also came up with those chutneys and such. /jam and curry.
  • jam and curry That's just gross.
  • jb: Yup, we use 'curry' to refer to dal. Strange how British call dal a 'dal', but call sabji 'curry'. Oh well...
  • I am so confused.
  • Read a href="http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health/story.jsp?story=504382">this and weep.
  • Read the way I fucked up that tag and weep some more. That link again. Apologies.
  • jam and curry *faint* I thought we were going to talk about sushi! *pout*
  • draw your weapons! 20 courses apart! Gyan, don't tell me - we're going to have a pilau fight? :)