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1. H:...
Cooking Indian Food at Home - Where to Start?
If you read my article, Curry - A Journey, published on the
Curry page of this site, you'll know that my first experiences
of the dish were of the generic variety which the British
invariably cooked and ate when living abroad a few decades ago.
You'll also know that I then discovered "real" Indian cookery
and decided that as I couldn't afford to eat out that much, I
needed to learn how to cook the stuff myself.
My first stop then, was a local bookshop, where the choice of
books on Indian cookery was somewhat limited. However, I struck
lucky and discovered a book called Indian Cookery by Madhur
Jaffrey - what a find. Written in simple language but with
lovely descriptive text and recommendations on what to serve
with what, it was just what I had been looking for.
There was a stumbling block, however, which was the endless list
of spices, seasonings and flavourings in the front of the book.
I didn't know where to start - I'd heard of quite a lot of them,
having watched a few TV programmes on Indian cooking but, "help"
I thought, "buying that many all at once is going to cost a
fortune". If you're thinking the same, don't panic. Check in
your store cupboard. You probably already have some of the items
you will need. For example, look for black peppercorns, bay
leaves, chilli powder (if you're already a fan of chilli con
carne), ground ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon if you bake
cakes or apple pies. Maybe you'll find mustard seeds if you do
your own pickling and sesame seeds if you make rolls or cook
Chinese food. That only leaves a few basic ingredients which
appear in a lot of Indian recipes - cumin, coriander, turmeric
and cardamom. Often you need ground cumin and coriander but if
you buy the whole spices, you can grind them as necessary (and
they keep longer that way too).
The other thing I did was to choose a fairly simple recipe
to
start with and I just bought the spices I needed for that. The
next time I want to cook an Indian meal, I chose another recipe
with similar ingredients so I had to just buy a couple more
things. Soon enough I built up a whole store cupboard of the
things I needed and it didn't have had such a drastic effect on
my wallet.
Then there was no stopping me - I even know some recipes by
heart now and you can do the same if you want to.
You don't need special equipment for Indian cookery, although I
wouldn't be without my electric coffee grinder (to grind spices)
and it's nice (but not necessary) to have the traditional dishes
to serve your meal in. Other than that, you need a bit of
patience and it's fun to cook with a friend so that you can
share the chopping and grinding or have someone read the recipe
out to you step by step so you don't go wrong in the middle.
The flavours are great, a curry evening is really sociable, so
go on, give it a try.
Liz Canham:
As well as a love of Asian cooking and travel as you can see in
her
Asian Food and Cookery and
Travellers' Tales websites, Liz seeks to
help newcomers to the world of internet marketing with tools,
tips and training from her
Liz-e-Biz.com website.
About the author:
Liz Canham:
As well as a love of Asian cooking and travel as you can see in
her
Asian Food and
Cookery and
Travellers'
Tales websites, Liz seeks to help newcomers to the world of
internet marketing with tools, tips and training from her
Liz-e-Biz.com website.
