The Essential Guide to Curry Powder
The Origins of a Favorite Cooking Spice
When left alone in the kitchen for too long by their wives, most blokes know how to knock up a decent curry. Almost anything can be used as a starting point, but to disguise the leftovers convincingly, you will need some decent curry powder – or you can make your own.
Some History
The origins of this traditional spice mix date back to the sixteenth century to India and Malaysia where it was used to flavour meat, vegetables and fish. Typical ingredients would be curry leaves (karri patta), coriander, cumin, mustard, turmeric, fenugreek and black pepper, but the more pungent chilli peppers were introduced later - from the New World. Ideally, the spices should be freshly prepared from dry roasted ingredients, but nowadays they are easily purchased in a ready ground form, which can be used to create your own designer curry.
Commercial mixtures first got a mention in cook books around 1790 (1), and while these represent a valiant attempt by retailers to imitate the original Indian recipe, they lack the “kick” of the ready ground blends. Check the sell-by dates carefully because powdered mixtures will never keep fresh for long, even though they may still be safe to use. Keep them out of sunlight, in a cool, dry and airtight container. The salad compartment of your fridge is preferable to that new spice rack!
The demand for a home market in curry powder increased during the years of the British Raj, with extra ingredients such as cinnamon, cloves, ginger, cardamom and chillies appearing for the first time. Adulteration with rice and sago flours was common practice, although many would say that modern versions are no better, bearing little resemblance to the original recipe.
Vital Ingredients
Nevertheless, as a dish gains momentum, there is nothing more satisfying than throwing in some extra items, which in my book has to include some juicy red peppers of the Capsicum family. The sweet and hot varieties are easily distinguished by shape and size. The smaller hot chilli peppers have an ancient pedigree, and were cultivated in Mexico as long ago as 3500 BC. They spread to Europe, India and SE Asia with a little help from Christopher Columbus and have become an established part of our cuisine. Their hot flavour results from a very active ingredient, capsaicin, which is found mainly in the seeds. Capsaicin is almost insoluble in water, so cold water is no salve in an emergency (1). Try yoghurt or cheese, which coats the taste receptors on the tongue and helps to reduce the agony
Measuring the taste
The Scoville scale of hotness for chillies is equivalent to the Richter scale for earthquakes, and refers to the dilution factor (using sugar solution) needed to remove the taste from any given sample of chilli. Sweet peppers score zero, whereas the cayenne and tabasco varieties hit 4,000 and 60,000 respectively. It gets worse, but I’ll stop there!
Useful advice
Nutritionally, raw sweet red peppers are no different to most vegetables with a high vitamin C, carotene and potassium content. Chilli peppers consumed within a curry sauce, provide you with useful amounts of iron, potassium, calcium and magnesium, (2) most of which you will lose if you over-indulge and suffer diarrhoea. On a more positive note, turmeric is a well-documented herbal medicine with anti-inflammatory properties linked to arthritis and Alzheimer’s disease. The dosage? 1800mg per day on an empty stomach. (3) This equates to one large portion of curry containing four dessertspoons of curry powder, made up as follows:
- 1 dessertspoon turmeric powder
- 1 dessertspoon ground cumin
- 1 dessertspoon ground coriander
- 1 dessertspoonful garam masala
Mix the spices well and slowly add a trickle of cold water to produce a thick paste. Add a little extra water once the paste is evenly mixed. Incorporate this into your chosen recipe according to taste. What are you waiting for?
References
- Davidson A. (2002) The Penguin Companion to Food. Penguin Books
- Food Standards Agency (2002) McCance and Widdowson's The Composition of Foods. 6th Edit. The Royal Society of Chemistry
- Fetrow C. W, Avila J. R. (1999) Complementary and Alternative Medicines. Springhouse.
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