I think I read it in my early twenties, when it came out. I reread it a couple of years back, and was astounded at just how much it had settled into my mind and deeply influenced my life thereafter.
Me too! I came across a Little Golden Book called We Like Kindergarten in a family box that gave me a serious swoon of memory. I’m experimenting with how I want to write about it. :-)
I lived in Cape Town for over a decade and have been back in California now for about the same. I was literally telling my husband today how sad it makes me sometimes that I can't just pick up some cheap samosas at every shop. Also discovered your books at the Cape Town public library so it was a great place to live for lots of reasons.
Have been to CT a few times — fascinating place. And so close to so much beauty. Stellenbosch is gorgeous. Don't know if you've tried the Safeway vegetable samosas, but in a pinch...
Yes, I've never lived anywhere surrounded by as much natural beauty as Cape Town. I'll have to see if the Vons down here has the Safeway samosas, I think they're related. I've even been reduced to making them myself from scratch, like I used to make Mexican food when I lived there!
True. I got lucky enough to marry an excellent chef though, so I like to put my favorite things in front of him so that he can make them at home and it's been pretty successful so far. He did my favorite butter chicken the other day and it was amazing. Just need to get him to South Africa to taste the samosas and I might be in with a chance.
Bubble and squeak, fried. Sends me back to Saturday night teatime. And overly dilute orange squash because my dad was really stingy and made it weak to get the value out of the bottle.
Funny how parental influence generally makes the difference - for good or bad ;-) And heck yes on bubble and squeak: whenever I've making Christmas lunch I'm mainly thinking of the B&S the next day...
To this day, if we make any meal that includes mash & cabbage, we always make extra - specifically for the next day's fry-up. We do have a tendency these days to, let me not say adulterate it, but 'jazz it up' with an egg & some strong grated cheddar; keep smooshing it up until one sets as the other melts & an equilibrium is reached. ;))
Although the samosa is the most wonderful eating experience known to humankind, the thing that takes me _right back in time is elderflower cordial, especially if it’s fizzy. (Ie elderflower pop (lemonade)).
Through the early part of my childhood, every summer there were 3 large porcelain bowls (the ones that are white inside and light brown on the outside) covered with muslin, and lots of elderflowers steeping in them in the pantry (as someone else said - no refrigerators). The smell was gorgeous. And “is it ready yet?”; “is it ready now” and on and on.
Back in Germany from 1964 until 1970 I lived with my grandmother. She had an enormous garden with every kind of fruit trees, vegetables including potatoes.. all grown pesticide free. So in autumn she would harvest the potatoes, fire up the old wood stove in the cellar and make potato cakes or what some call hash browns but MUCH better. They were fried in lard (my arteries are clogging while I’m writing) and served with mashed apples. Some say apple sauce but it was more like a compote. Neighbours were lining up with their plates.
I’ve tried to replicate the recipe here, have even found lard in the supermarket however, the finished product, although delicious to me hasn’t found any following and I haven’t made them in years.
I feel a trip to the supermarket is on the card’s for tomorrow 😊
Mmm - the potato and apple combination sounds dreamy! Your memory is going to send me to the store, too. 😂 Would she have used bacon/meat fat saved in a can from her cooking? That would give the lard a flavor hard to reproduce.
Ikr.. these people lived through 2 WW and when we went to visit relatives they would feed 12 ppl with one chicken! There were cats of potatoes and the gravy had two inches of fat on top😂
You can still get lard in any supermarket in the UK. It's somewhat over-refined & no longer has that home-made feel, though, with authentic burnt bits. My mum used to just keep a jar she'd top up & recycle; bacon, beef dripping, pork fat, all went in. And…what's a fridge? These days health & safety would have a field day, but we survived to tell the tale;)
Indeed :-) And yeah, you want lard with murky patches and bits in it... to the point where it actually gives you echoes of the roast dinner it was scraped from the pan of!
I didn't discover samosas until a little later, early 80s.
Before that, my food of choice, always late nights after a gig in or near Bradford, was the very basic curry that you used to be able to buy for a pound, including three free chapattis; they didn't sell rice, no-one did back then. It very much hurts me that these days they want up to two quid each for a simple piece of flat bread.
Keema Madras was, & still is if I can ever find a decent one, my single favourite food. Basic, tongue-numbingly hot. No airs, no graces. Food of the gods. For some reason if you ask for one in London you generally just get blank stares. I once got "Oooh, that could be interesting" & they had a go. It was close but no cigar. You also have to specifically ask for it hotter than they would normally do it. Curries have got much milder over the years.
This would be supplemented, for an extra 50p, with a shami kebab; not the soft squishy type subtly dipped in egg, these were a more heavy industrial version, a bit like a deep-fried burger. Served on large slices of raw onion & a splash of 'mint sauce' [thin yoghurt with supermarket jarred mint sauce, as in the stuff you put on lamb for Sunday dinner, with a dash of generic curry powder & cayenne.]
Complete the image with a brightly-lit, white-painted cafe, formica tables & a young lad, fourteen or so, who ran the whole front of house; taking the orders from a raised booth in the corner so he looked as tall as everyone else when behind the counter - a bit like Danny DeVito in Taxi - then dashing round, spinning plain white pyrex dishes towards you at some speed over the shiny formica surface, without spilling a drop. Food was served as it was ready, not when you wanted it, so your main would always show up halfway through your shami starter, crowding the table to bursting. Dig in, lads.
Cutlery was, of course, your three chappatis. They had one spoon behind the counter which would be ceremoniously presented, to peals of laughter, should anyone be foolish enough to ask for cutlery.
As a truly complete memory, it's hard to recreate. I can make the Keema Madras myself these days. It's also close but no cigar. I can make my own chappatis, again imperfect. The shami kebabs, I've not a clue how they did it.
I almost feel like I'm there, tasting those flavors! Funny how curry is such a foundational taste for so many Brits. It took us forever to find a decent place here in Santa Cruz (well, they opened recently). Apparently it's a lot easier over the hill in Silicon Valley. And I think you're right about some of the curries being toned down, too.
Those functional eating places so often leave the best memories: like the family Italians you can still find hidden away in back streets in central London. They may not technically provide the "best version" of any given dish, but there's something about the overall experience that's impossible to match
There's a "thing" about British curry. As it first spread from London to the rest of the UK, post WWII, it wasn't made by people who were chefs by trade & it wasn't even made for people from the Indian sub-continent. Almost the entire industry was built on community self-help for Syhleti sailors who'd jumped ship in London. Many of them found refuge near Brick Lane & worked as porters or dish-washers at Veerashwamy's or the few similar restaurants in London at that time, who made 'curries for English people missing the Raj' out of whatever they could get in the UK; mainly from curry powders rather than the traditional separate methods employed 'back home'… not only that, their 'back home' was Syhlet, in modern-day Bangladesh… a thousand miles from Madras or Bombay, as was. They had no clue what a southern Indian dish really was. What they learned by working at those early establishments was how to make 'fake Indian food for 'homesick' Brits.'
Hence the birth of the now world-famous, much-copied "BIR".
I love[d] Pratchett's take on life. Is that the one where Vimes' four food groups are established too? Sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits. Food of the gods, if they're paying attention.
I do, however, feel a little disingenuous discussing one of my favourite authors on another of my favourite authors' blog ;)))
(I only really have three 'true favourites' & two of them are no longer with us. Don't want to poke Binky's jockey any more than I have to.)
Indeed, and honestly, BIR is kinda what I'm looking for much of the time! Though I've come to love the more vinigary taste of some other varieties... well, let's face it, pretty much any curry is a good curry. Only once in a thousand curry meals have I been at a place where it was genuinely inedible: largely because they'd done that lazy thing of elevating the heat purely by dumping a tablespoon of cayenne at the very last minute.
The vinegary thing is a leftover from the first 'colonists' - the Portuguese. That's where we got the [as real as it can be for BIR] Vindaloo from. [Also, if you ever try to make a curry with a paste from a jar:\
If you're ever back in the UK, I can give you some tips/recommendations - but they're all in Leeds/Bradford, 200m North of London. In 30 years I haven't found one in London to challenge them for the depth of flavour [not that I've tried them *all* by any stretch] though London has some good 'real' Indian restaurants now, rather than BIR.
My two pet hates are:- 1) The 'polite curry'. It looks like a curry, it smells like a curry, but it just doesn't *taste* like one. 2) The 'not a clue curry'. Obviously made from a jar so everything tastes like an achari or vindaloo, no matter what you order.
A new one opened just 80 yards from us. I thought I'd been handed Nirvana at walking distance… until I tried it. It wasn't that it was inedible, it was just 'zero effort', jar to table stuff. Never went back. It lasted a year. The only good one in walking distance recently folded, after being there since at least the 80s. That was a shame. It's now a fried chicken shop… like we need another of those. there must be 10 in the area, all identikit copies of KFC.
I live in an area with a high Turkish immigrant population. If I want great street or restaurant food, it's on my doorstep, choice of twenty within 10 minutes' walk. No need to put up with a bad curry.
Turkish food can be ****ing great, too. If I'm ever in the Leeds/Bradford area, I'll hit you up for recommends. One of the most memorable curries I've ever had was in Leicester, though that was partly because — while munching through a fantastic Jalfrezi — I put an entire fork-load of what I *thought* were green peppers into my mouth. Hope, chilis, seeds and all. Oh dear god. I honestly thought I was going to die for the next half hour. Meanwhile, my pals laughed their heads off, naturally.
Ah, yes, the surprisingly hot green finger chillies. They do seem to define the Jalfrezi these days. In my younger days 'oop North' Jalfrezis were defined by sliced, or sometimes whole, hard-boiled egg. Not something I ate a lot of. Now in London, it's the chillies; no sign of any egg.
Even my favourite in Leeds/Bradford [some of the good ones are small chains now, spreading across the county] has taken to adding one to many of their dishes. It's bigger - somewhat fresno-like - so easy to avoid if you don't need the extra hit.
All this food talk has made me hungry for a curry - I haven't had one since… ooohh… Thursday. ;)
I'm going to try a 'home' recipe version of a lamb karahi rather than a BIR. No onion, lots of fresh tomato, an entire bulb of garlic & those finger chillies too! With home made chapattis. Just like the old days, no cutlery, though I'm not going to eat it in a white room with a formica table, or 20 fluorescent tubes.
I have never tried Samsa. Here you don't easily find other people's food (it's not sold everywhere, on street corners). Now I will find it', which means that my good moment of excellent enjoyment is yet to come. Instead, I have another great experience to tell. As a child, I didn't like eggplants. They seemed to me useless food, chewy, clunky, tasteless. Until I moved to Italy. Here I met the recipe "Eggplant Parmesan". Now I love them.
P.S. “….At the end of an afternoon on the beach, however, my father would walk my sister and I out of the whites-only section and into the others, often chatting to random people he met along the way. He’d finish by taking us to a stall in the Indian section where you could buy samosas, and we’d stand and eat them there and then.“….bello…..
Eggplant Parm is one of my very favorite things. My mother used to eat it at the family restaurant we went to for forty years, but like you... I didn't get it. I have very much grown into it as the years go by!
Sadly not :-) It was called the Adriatico, and out in London suburbs in Essex. My mother happened to go there the week it opened; then by co-incidence, my father and sister and sister-in-law happened to be there the week it finally closed 40 years later. In the intervening years, we must have eaten there 150 + times.
Aaa!!! Yes ! Yes ! I imagine that in London there are all the cuisines of the world!!! Just like in America. Anyway, I'll find samosa and try it. Thanks for the advice.
For me it's root beer flavored candies. A store in our little town carried candy canes, those variously flavored rods of sugar, and I would always get root beer flavor. Recently I was in a grocery store and spotted root beer barrels, little nuggets of the same stuff, and bought them to the astonishment and consternation of my wife. Yup, I was instantly a kid again.
Here in the states I keep an eye out for punjabi samosas, but never find them. They are everywhere in UAE, and I ate them constantly there. I miss them terribly.
A group of us were at a cooking class and the taste of the cheesecake instantly transported me back to being a kid and my granny’s Dutch apple pie. The flavour profile was the same and it was the first time I have had anything close to that in 50 years.
Your samosa story brought back a torrent of memories for me. As a lifelong anti-apartheid activist, I visited South Africa for the first time in 1991 at the invitation of the ANC to attend its first "legal" Congress since it was banned in 1960. I, a very white Englishman, was with my African-American law partner. He would have been barred from even entering the hotel the year before. We couldn't afford separate rooms and wound up sharing a double bed at the Maharani Hotel on Durban's beachfront.
A host of ANC activists thronged the rooms, restaurants and bars. Many had just emerged from fighting the almost-over guerrilla war against the vicious regime which still ran South Africa, even if they didn't control it.
I can almost taste the freshness of the spices and see the shining copper bowls in my mind's eye. And I can still see the confused attempts at smiles on the faces of the upper class whites who had booked their rooms at the Maharani so they could bet on the horses at the nearby racecourse. I can never read the word race-course without thinking of those remarkable Durban days.
How much has changed and how much has failed to change since those heady days but my love of samosas is as strong as ever.
God, I remember the Maharani! I seem to also recall dad highly rating the food there. That whole seafront — with its shallow swimming pool and little model town — is seared into my memory far more deeply than I would have expected. That must have been an utterly extraordinary evening... and felt like the cusp of a new world: that has, as you note, still to truly arrive.
“Prepared by others” does seem to be key. I can make chicken and dumplings just like my mom, using the same recipe from her red-checkered Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. I can make my Bavarian grandma’s apfel maultaschen, using the recipe she typed out on an index card. But food just doesn’t taste the same when I make it, even though my family think it tastes the same. The smell of food, however, transports me regardless of how it tastes. And that’s good, because a lot of the foods I grew up eating, I wouldn't choose to eat again.
"Prepared by others" is everything. Almost nothing you ever cook yourself tastes as good to you as it might to other people. There's something about that element of "otherness"... plus, you've been under the good, chopping and cooked everything, and by the time it's on the table you're often slightly tired of it ;-)
In keeping with the yummy parcels of goodness theme: when I was a very young girl, the only cuisine my parents ordered in other than fish and chips was Chinese food. So for me it's pancake rolls: those huge parcels stuffed to bursting with distinctively seasoned beansprouts, shrimp and BBQ pork that I've only ever found in British Chinese takeaways. My Mum used to order one and split it between the four of us so we'd have to fight over which of us would get one of the coveted end pieces. One of those with some Chinese curry sauce is always the very first thing I want to eat on a trip back to the UK, and when I do it transports me back to those family Sunday takeouts of yore (that I now realise only happened when my mum was too tired to cook a roast dinner).
So true! Takeaway British spring rolls are/were a whole different animal — they're like frickin' burritos in terms of size and stuffing... god, I'd forgotten those. And now REALLY WANT ONE.
Then lucky for you that you'll be able to have one soon enough. Just make sure you order the pancake roll rather than spring rolls: a lot of places offer both on their menus these days.
Me too. Though I’d have to add Zen and the Art of Motorcycling to that to be complete.
That book genuinely changed my life. Wound up studying philosophy at Cambridge solely because of it.
LOL
I think I read it in my early twenties, when it came out. I reread it a couple of years back, and was astounded at just how much it had settled into my mind and deeply influenced my life thereafter.
Me too! I came across a Little Golden Book called We Like Kindergarten in a family box that gave me a serious swoon of memory. I’m experimenting with how I want to write about it. :-)
Ha :-) Well, if there's a book that disproves my assertion, then I'm honored it should be that.
😂🤓
What were the lilac nut bars called, do you remember? As an Aussie child of the 70s, I’m trying to work out what they could have been...
I've no idea, sadly! And apart from that one time in Moss Landing, I've never encountered anything like them...
I lived in Cape Town for over a decade and have been back in California now for about the same. I was literally telling my husband today how sad it makes me sometimes that I can't just pick up some cheap samosas at every shop. Also discovered your books at the Cape Town public library so it was a great place to live for lots of reasons.
Have been to CT a few times — fascinating place. And so close to so much beauty. Stellenbosch is gorgeous. Don't know if you've tried the Safeway vegetable samosas, but in a pinch...
Yes, I've never lived anywhere surrounded by as much natural beauty as Cape Town. I'll have to see if the Vons down here has the Safeway samosas, I think they're related. I've even been reduced to making them myself from scratch, like I used to make Mexican food when I lived there!
As Daphne just said, sadly stuff you make yourself never quite has that taste you're looking for, sadly :-)
True. I got lucky enough to marry an excellent chef though, so I like to put my favorite things in front of him so that he can make them at home and it's been pretty successful so far. He did my favorite butter chicken the other day and it was amazing. Just need to get him to South Africa to taste the samosas and I might be in with a chance.
BOOK THE FLIGHT NOW
Bubble and squeak, fried. Sends me back to Saturday night teatime. And overly dilute orange squash because my dad was really stingy and made it weak to get the value out of the bottle.
Kia-Ora at the Saturday afternoon film matinee!
Funny how parental influence generally makes the difference - for good or bad ;-) And heck yes on bubble and squeak: whenever I've making Christmas lunch I'm mainly thinking of the B&S the next day...
To this day, if we make any meal that includes mash & cabbage, we always make extra - specifically for the next day's fry-up. We do have a tendency these days to, let me not say adulterate it, but 'jazz it up' with an egg & some strong grated cheddar; keep smooshing it up until one sets as the other melts & an equilibrium is reached. ;))
Ooh that sounds amazing! I'm even more starving now waiting on our Indian takeaway (no samosas though 😄)
Although the samosa is the most wonderful eating experience known to humankind, the thing that takes me _right back in time is elderflower cordial, especially if it’s fizzy. (Ie elderflower pop (lemonade)).
God, yes - the taste of Elderflower does take me back to one of my grandmothers.
Through the early part of my childhood, every summer there were 3 large porcelain bowls (the ones that are white inside and light brown on the outside) covered with muslin, and lots of elderflowers steeping in them in the pantry (as someone else said - no refrigerators). The smell was gorgeous. And “is it ready yet?”; “is it ready now” and on and on.
Ah, those memories of things prepared — and looked forward to — on an annual basis...
Back in Germany from 1964 until 1970 I lived with my grandmother. She had an enormous garden with every kind of fruit trees, vegetables including potatoes.. all grown pesticide free. So in autumn she would harvest the potatoes, fire up the old wood stove in the cellar and make potato cakes or what some call hash browns but MUCH better. They were fried in lard (my arteries are clogging while I’m writing) and served with mashed apples. Some say apple sauce but it was more like a compote. Neighbours were lining up with their plates.
I’ve tried to replicate the recipe here, have even found lard in the supermarket however, the finished product, although delicious to me hasn’t found any following and I haven’t made them in years.
I feel a trip to the supermarket is on the card’s for tomorrow 😊
Mmm - the potato and apple combination sounds dreamy! Your memory is going to send me to the store, too. 😂 Would she have used bacon/meat fat saved in a can from her cooking? That would give the lard a flavor hard to reproduce.
It would have been pork fat as beef was too expensive. They still did their own slaughter and absolutely nothing was wasted.
The way it should be!
Ikr.. these people lived through 2 WW and when we went to visit relatives they would feed 12 ppl with one chicken! There were cats of potatoes and the gravy had two inches of fat on top😂
“Vats “ of potatoes
Shame — I like the idea of "cats of potatoes" ;-)
Dear god that sounds GOOD. And lard is a sad loss to everyday cooking... my mother used to keep some in the fridge.
You can still get lard in any supermarket in the UK. It's somewhat over-refined & no longer has that home-made feel, though, with authentic burnt bits. My mum used to just keep a jar she'd top up & recycle; bacon, beef dripping, pork fat, all went in. And…what's a fridge? These days health & safety would have a field day, but we survived to tell the tale;)
Indeed :-) And yeah, you want lard with murky patches and bits in it... to the point where it actually gives you echoes of the roast dinner it was scraped from the pan of!
I didn't discover samosas until a little later, early 80s.
Before that, my food of choice, always late nights after a gig in or near Bradford, was the very basic curry that you used to be able to buy for a pound, including three free chapattis; they didn't sell rice, no-one did back then. It very much hurts me that these days they want up to two quid each for a simple piece of flat bread.
Keema Madras was, & still is if I can ever find a decent one, my single favourite food. Basic, tongue-numbingly hot. No airs, no graces. Food of the gods. For some reason if you ask for one in London you generally just get blank stares. I once got "Oooh, that could be interesting" & they had a go. It was close but no cigar. You also have to specifically ask for it hotter than they would normally do it. Curries have got much milder over the years.
This would be supplemented, for an extra 50p, with a shami kebab; not the soft squishy type subtly dipped in egg, these were a more heavy industrial version, a bit like a deep-fried burger. Served on large slices of raw onion & a splash of 'mint sauce' [thin yoghurt with supermarket jarred mint sauce, as in the stuff you put on lamb for Sunday dinner, with a dash of generic curry powder & cayenne.]
Complete the image with a brightly-lit, white-painted cafe, formica tables & a young lad, fourteen or so, who ran the whole front of house; taking the orders from a raised booth in the corner so he looked as tall as everyone else when behind the counter - a bit like Danny DeVito in Taxi - then dashing round, spinning plain white pyrex dishes towards you at some speed over the shiny formica surface, without spilling a drop. Food was served as it was ready, not when you wanted it, so your main would always show up halfway through your shami starter, crowding the table to bursting. Dig in, lads.
Cutlery was, of course, your three chappatis. They had one spoon behind the counter which would be ceremoniously presented, to peals of laughter, should anyone be foolish enough to ask for cutlery.
As a truly complete memory, it's hard to recreate. I can make the Keema Madras myself these days. It's also close but no cigar. I can make my own chappatis, again imperfect. The shami kebabs, I've not a clue how they did it.
I can, though, nail the mint sauce.
I almost feel like I'm there, tasting those flavors! Funny how curry is such a foundational taste for so many Brits. It took us forever to find a decent place here in Santa Cruz (well, they opened recently). Apparently it's a lot easier over the hill in Silicon Valley. And I think you're right about some of the curries being toned down, too.
Those functional eating places so often leave the best memories: like the family Italians you can still find hidden away in back streets in central London. They may not technically provide the "best version" of any given dish, but there's something about the overall experience that's impossible to match
There's a "thing" about British curry. As it first spread from London to the rest of the UK, post WWII, it wasn't made by people who were chefs by trade & it wasn't even made for people from the Indian sub-continent. Almost the entire industry was built on community self-help for Syhleti sailors who'd jumped ship in London. Many of them found refuge near Brick Lane & worked as porters or dish-washers at Veerashwamy's or the few similar restaurants in London at that time, who made 'curries for English people missing the Raj' out of whatever they could get in the UK; mainly from curry powders rather than the traditional separate methods employed 'back home'… not only that, their 'back home' was Syhlet, in modern-day Bangladesh… a thousand miles from Madras or Bombay, as was. They had no clue what a southern Indian dish really was. What they learned by working at those early establishments was how to make 'fake Indian food for 'homesick' Brits.'
Hence the birth of the now world-famous, much-copied "BIR".
I love[d] Pratchett's take on life. Is that the one where Vimes' four food groups are established too? Sugar, starch, grease and burnt crunchy bits. Food of the gods, if they're paying attention.
I do, however, feel a little disingenuous discussing one of my favourite authors on another of my favourite authors' blog ;)))
(I only really have three 'true favourites' & two of them are no longer with us. Don't want to poke Binky's jockey any more than I have to.)
Indeed, and honestly, BIR is kinda what I'm looking for much of the time! Though I've come to love the more vinigary taste of some other varieties... well, let's face it, pretty much any curry is a good curry. Only once in a thousand curry meals have I been at a place where it was genuinely inedible: largely because they'd done that lazy thing of elevating the heat purely by dumping a tablespoon of cayenne at the very last minute.
The vinegary thing is a leftover from the first 'colonists' - the Portuguese. That's where we got the [as real as it can be for BIR] Vindaloo from. [Also, if you ever try to make a curry with a paste from a jar:\
If you're ever back in the UK, I can give you some tips/recommendations - but they're all in Leeds/Bradford, 200m North of London. In 30 years I haven't found one in London to challenge them for the depth of flavour [not that I've tried them *all* by any stretch] though London has some good 'real' Indian restaurants now, rather than BIR.
My two pet hates are:- 1) The 'polite curry'. It looks like a curry, it smells like a curry, but it just doesn't *taste* like one. 2) The 'not a clue curry'. Obviously made from a jar so everything tastes like an achari or vindaloo, no matter what you order.
A new one opened just 80 yards from us. I thought I'd been handed Nirvana at walking distance… until I tried it. It wasn't that it was inedible, it was just 'zero effort', jar to table stuff. Never went back. It lasted a year. The only good one in walking distance recently folded, after being there since at least the 80s. That was a shame. It's now a fried chicken shop… like we need another of those. there must be 10 in the area, all identikit copies of KFC.
I live in an area with a high Turkish immigrant population. If I want great street or restaurant food, it's on my doorstep, choice of twenty within 10 minutes' walk. No need to put up with a bad curry.
Turkish food can be ****ing great, too. If I'm ever in the Leeds/Bradford area, I'll hit you up for recommends. One of the most memorable curries I've ever had was in Leicester, though that was partly because — while munching through a fantastic Jalfrezi — I put an entire fork-load of what I *thought* were green peppers into my mouth. Hope, chilis, seeds and all. Oh dear god. I honestly thought I was going to die for the next half hour. Meanwhile, my pals laughed their heads off, naturally.
Ah, yes, the surprisingly hot green finger chillies. They do seem to define the Jalfrezi these days. In my younger days 'oop North' Jalfrezis were defined by sliced, or sometimes whole, hard-boiled egg. Not something I ate a lot of. Now in London, it's the chillies; no sign of any egg.
Even my favourite in Leeds/Bradford [some of the good ones are small chains now, spreading across the county] has taken to adding one to many of their dishes. It's bigger - somewhat fresno-like - so easy to avoid if you don't need the extra hit.
All this food talk has made me hungry for a curry - I haven't had one since… ooohh… Thursday. ;)
I'm going to try a 'home' recipe version of a lamb karahi rather than a BIR. No onion, lots of fresh tomato, an entire bulb of garlic & those finger chillies too! With home made chapattis. Just like the old days, no cutlery, though I'm not going to eat it in a white room with a formica table, or 20 fluorescent tubes.
I have never tried Samsa. Here you don't easily find other people's food (it's not sold everywhere, on street corners). Now I will find it', which means that my good moment of excellent enjoyment is yet to come. Instead, I have another great experience to tell. As a child, I didn't like eggplants. They seemed to me useless food, chewy, clunky, tasteless. Until I moved to Italy. Here I met the recipe "Eggplant Parmesan". Now I love them.
P.S. “….At the end of an afternoon on the beach, however, my father would walk my sister and I out of the whites-only section and into the others, often chatting to random people he met along the way. He’d finish by taking us to a stall in the Indian section where you could buy samosas, and we’d stand and eat them there and then.“….bello…..
Eggplant Parm is one of my very favorite things. My mother used to eat it at the family restaurant we went to for forty years, but like you... I didn't get it. I have very much grown into it as the years go by!
Forty years is a long time. Can I ask…. was it an Italian restaurant in London? If so, then you are more of an Italian food expert than I am…..
Sadly not :-) It was called the Adriatico, and out in London suburbs in Essex. My mother happened to go there the week it opened; then by co-incidence, my father and sister and sister-in-law happened to be there the week it finally closed 40 years later. In the intervening years, we must have eaten there 150 + times.
Aaa!!! Yes ! Yes ! I imagine that in London there are all the cuisines of the world!!! Just like in America. Anyway, I'll find samosa and try it. Thanks for the advice.
Michael, I love this.
Thank you, Mollie — coming from you, that means a lot!
For me it's root beer flavored candies. A store in our little town carried candy canes, those variously flavored rods of sugar, and I would always get root beer flavor. Recently I was in a grocery store and spotted root beer barrels, little nuggets of the same stuff, and bought them to the astonishment and consternation of my wife. Yup, I was instantly a kid again.
Here in the states I keep an eye out for punjabi samosas, but never find them. They are everywhere in UAE, and I ate them constantly there. I miss them terribly.
Flavor is a strange thing, isn't it. And someone should do a samosa startup here in the US...
A group of us were at a cooking class and the taste of the cheesecake instantly transported me back to being a kid and my granny’s Dutch apple pie. The flavour profile was the same and it was the first time I have had anything close to that in 50 years.
It's weird how strong that sensation can be...
Yum. All I got.
Sums it up ;-)
Your samosa story brought back a torrent of memories for me. As a lifelong anti-apartheid activist, I visited South Africa for the first time in 1991 at the invitation of the ANC to attend its first "legal" Congress since it was banned in 1960. I, a very white Englishman, was with my African-American law partner. He would have been barred from even entering the hotel the year before. We couldn't afford separate rooms and wound up sharing a double bed at the Maharani Hotel on Durban's beachfront.
A host of ANC activists thronged the rooms, restaurants and bars. Many had just emerged from fighting the almost-over guerrilla war against the vicious regime which still ran South Africa, even if they didn't control it.
I can almost taste the freshness of the spices and see the shining copper bowls in my mind's eye. And I can still see the confused attempts at smiles on the faces of the upper class whites who had booked their rooms at the Maharani so they could bet on the horses at the nearby racecourse. I can never read the word race-course without thinking of those remarkable Durban days.
How much has changed and how much has failed to change since those heady days but my love of samosas is as strong as ever.
God, I remember the Maharani! I seem to also recall dad highly rating the food there. That whole seafront — with its shallow swimming pool and little model town — is seared into my memory far more deeply than I would have expected. That must have been an utterly extraordinary evening... and felt like the cusp of a new world: that has, as you note, still to truly arrive.
“Prepared by others” does seem to be key. I can make chicken and dumplings just like my mom, using the same recipe from her red-checkered Better Homes and Gardens Cookbook. I can make my Bavarian grandma’s apfel maultaschen, using the recipe she typed out on an index card. But food just doesn’t taste the same when I make it, even though my family think it tastes the same. The smell of food, however, transports me regardless of how it tastes. And that’s good, because a lot of the foods I grew up eating, I wouldn't choose to eat again.
"Prepared by others" is everything. Almost nothing you ever cook yourself tastes as good to you as it might to other people. There's something about that element of "otherness"... plus, you've been under the good, chopping and cooked everything, and by the time it's on the table you're often slightly tired of it ;-)
HAHAHAHA. Need the money and time off work, but it's definitely happening. If I get a home source of samosas, we'll have to mail you some.
Careful what you promise... you'll find me on your doorstep with a plate ;-)
In keeping with the yummy parcels of goodness theme: when I was a very young girl, the only cuisine my parents ordered in other than fish and chips was Chinese food. So for me it's pancake rolls: those huge parcels stuffed to bursting with distinctively seasoned beansprouts, shrimp and BBQ pork that I've only ever found in British Chinese takeaways. My Mum used to order one and split it between the four of us so we'd have to fight over which of us would get one of the coveted end pieces. One of those with some Chinese curry sauce is always the very first thing I want to eat on a trip back to the UK, and when I do it transports me back to those family Sunday takeouts of yore (that I now realise only happened when my mum was too tired to cook a roast dinner).
So true! Takeaway British spring rolls are/were a whole different animal — they're like frickin' burritos in terms of size and stuffing... god, I'd forgotten those. And now REALLY WANT ONE.
Then lucky for you that you'll be able to have one soon enough. Just make sure you order the pancake roll rather than spring rolls: a lot of places offer both on their menus these days.
Ah, good tip — thank you!