Mughal Curry Sauce

I still have the book of hand­writ­ten recipes that my friends and fam­ily made me when I moved to America from India. It’s funny, because I never cooked Indian food in India. I was inter­ested in bak­ing, but not cook­ing. I started cook­ing Indian food only after I moved to Arizona. And I would always call my mother back in India with ques­tions. That’s also when I decided to go to culi­nary school.

–Anjana Shanker, Culinary Research Assistant, The Cooking Lab

7 Things You Didn’t Know About Curry

1. What does it mean? The term “curry” is gen­er­ally thought to come from the word kari, which means “sauce” in the Tamil lan­guage of Southern India. When the British arrived in India, they broad­ened the term to include all of the spicy dishes from the sub­con­ti­nent, regard­less of style or con­tent. Curry leaves (shown at right) are also linked in their ety­mol­ogy to the word kari. It is thought that they were given the name because they are often found in cur­ries of Southern India.

 

2. A curry a day keeps the doc­tor away. Curry leaves include antiox­i­dants, which may reduce the risk of cell dam­age in the human body.

 

3. Curries were born at a cross­roads of human­ity. Northern cur­ries have had heavy influ­ences from the Mughal Empire (con­querors from the Middle East, who brought with them nuts and dried fruit). When the British came, they found cur­ries to be too spicy; to accom­mo­date the new arrivals, cooks started adding heavy cream to their cur­ries. In the south, Portuguese traders brought toma­toes and chilies with them from the New World, which came to be a sta­ple of cur­ries in those regions. Northern cur­ries are typ­i­cally made with dried spices and then served with wheat flat­breads, whereas Southern cur­ries typ­i­cally include fresh herbs and are served with rice.

 

4. Curries are com­pli­cated. All cur­ries have seven dis­tinc­tive ele­ments of taste: sour, sweet, salty, bit­ter, pun­gent, and astrin­gent. It is impor­tant to achieve the right bal­ance of these flavors.

 

5. Curry keeps. Before refrig­er­a­tion was com­mon, cooks relied on some of the spices and fer­mented dairy prod­ucts in cur­ries to help pre­serve the food by cur­tail­ing the mul­ti­pli­ca­tion of harm­ful bacteria.

 

6. Order of prepa­ra­tion mat­ters. You’ll get dif­fer­ent fla­vors in your curry depend­ing on which ingre­di­ents go into the pot first. One approach is to first toast the spices in oil to release the aro­mat­ics, and then add the onions, toma­toes, and other ingre­di­ents. Alternatively, you can cook the onions first, and then add the spices to the sautéed onions. Each method is worth a try, and you may be sur­prised at how much they vary in taste.

 

7. Chilies are choosy about their rides. Chili plants may have evolved cap­saicin, the com­pound that gives them their heat, as a way to make sure their seeds are dis­persed widely and with­out dam­age. The pep­pers are appeal­ing food for birds, who lack the chem­i­cal recep­tor required to taste cap­saicin. They don’t feel the heat, so they can eat chilies with aban­don. That’s good for the plant because bird’s beaks and diges­tive sys­tems tend to keep the seeds intact, which gives the seeds a good chance of ger­mi­nat­ing when they are, ahem, dropped off. Mammals, on the other hand, tend to crush the seeds while they chew, but they don’t do this often because most find the heat intol­er­a­ble, with one notable excep­tion: humans!

Is your mouth water­ing yet? We encour­age you to try mak­ing the Mughal Curry Sauce from the Historic Lamb Curries plated-dish recipe in Modernist Cuisine:

Tips for Cooking the Mughal Curry Sauce

• Depending on what tex­ture you pre­fer, you may want to strain your nut pastes or add more water before the final sim­mer. If you use a Vitamix, you prob­a­bly won’t have to strain the paste, but you still might want to add extra water for a more milky rather than strictly paste-like consistency.

 

• If you don’t have the time to soak the nuts and poppy seeds for 12 hours, you can soften them by cook­ing them in a pres­sure cooker at a gauge pres­sure of 1 bar / 15 psi for 45 minutes.

 

• Use white poppy seeds to keep your curry’s color bright.

 

• We pre­fer to toast our spices in the oven, as it allows for more con­trol, but the tra­di­tional way is to toast them in a skil­let. Either method works.

 

• You can buy green car­damom in their pods or shelled. If you get them in their pods, you can shell them either before or after you toast your spices.

 

• Grind your spices in a cof­fee grinder to cre­ate a pow­der. The tex­ture of the spices can affect the curry’s tex­ture as well as the taste.

 

• As with all of the cur­ries from MC, we like to serve this one with lamb shanks. We cook the lamb shanks sous vide in a 58 °C / 136 °F bath. You can make the lamb in advance and reheat it at that tem­per­a­ture for one hour before serving.

 

• As this is a Northern curry, we like to serve it with flat­bread. You can make your own parathas, a type of flat­bread with puff pas­try dough. Roll two lay­ers of the pas­try on top of each other, dust with thinly sliced green chilies, and pan­fry until they are golden and cooked through.

 

Additional Tips for Cooking Any Curry

• Do all of your prep work in advance, because mov­ing quickly from step to step can be impor­tant to the process.

 

• Most peo­ple don’t actu­ally eat the curry leaves. You can even take them out before serv­ing, or just push them to the side of your plate.

 

• Curry leaves do not freeze well. Some peo­ple freeze-dry them, but they lose their potency, so it is best to use them up right away.

 

• Chilies do freeze well. You can even chop them up while still frozen, allow­ing you more precision.

 

• Pastes can also be frozen. Put extra pastes in freezer trays to form ice cubes, and store them in ziplock bags.

 

• Instead of buy­ing curry pow­der, mix your own spices. Most curry pow­ders con­tain corian­der, turmeric, cumin, fenu­greek, and red pep­per (cayenne). When you mix to your own taste each time you make a curry, store-bought curry pow­der will taste bland in com­par­i­son. Keep your pantry stocked with these staples.

 

• When you toast aro­mat­ics in oil (as described in #6 of the 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Curry list above), keep a lid on your skil­let, as seeds will “pop” and release their mois­ture when they heat up. Let them pop for 10 sec­onds before tak­ing the skil­let off the burner.

 

• If you can’t find ghee, use cook­ing oil instead. Some peo­ple even pre­fer using oil because it has less cho­les­terol. Groundnut, sesame, mus­tard seed, sun­flower, and corn oil are all good options. Using reg­u­lar but­ter is not ideal because it turns brown easily.

 

• Different chilies can be used instead of what the recipe calls for. For exam­ple, if you can’t find Thai chilies, use bird’s eye chilies instead.

We served this lamb shank with Mughal curry, Indian sor­rel leaves, fresh apri­cot slices, and cashew hal­vah (for the hal­vah recipe, see page 5·93).

The con­sis­tency is more milky than paste-like after it has been strained.

Indian curry spices from left to right: (top) cloves, mace, cumin, chili pow­der, fenu­greek; (mid­dle) fen­nel, black pep­per­corns, green car­damom pods, turmeric, nut­meg; (bot­tom) dried chilis, corian­der, pome­gran­ate seeds, cin­na­mon sticks, star anise.

Soaked and unsoaked cashews and almonds with unsoaked white poppy seeds.

Fresh ingre­di­ents com­mon in cur­ries from left to right: (top) shal­lots, gin­ger, gar­lic; (sec­ond row) curry leaves, red and green Thai chilies; (third row) toma­toes, peeled and unpeeled fresh tamarind; (bot­tom) fresh bay leaves, and turmeric root.

Mughal curry spices before and after grind­ing in a cof­fee grinder.

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