A Linguistic Project

For this coming month, my friend Miss Kagashi (of The Steamer's Trunk,) has laid forth a little challenge. The details are on her blog, but in short—you are challenged to learn a language.

Being as I already know a fair bit of French, though my abilities are on the wane due to lack of usage—rendered now mostly a way to be easily annoyed by culinary professionals pronouncing things like "foie gras" as "fwah gwah"—and a fair bit of Yiddish, my usage of which is regular enough to keep me speaking it convincingly, I've decided to add a third foreign language to my acumen.

I've spoken before about my maternal grandparents, both of whom grew up in Vienna, and both of whom were born around the time of the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While learning German—the language of Austria—would certainly be easy, given that Yiddish is very close in structure and vocabulary, I've decided to do something a little more daring, a little more dangerous, and a little more difficult: I'm going to learn some Hungarian, properly called Magyar. It's a Finno-Ugric language, unrelated to German, English, or French. It's got a modified Latin alphabet, but the word forms are going to be rather alien to me.

Oh dear.

Paprikas will be forthcoming, I suspect.

Curry Powders

Image by Thomas Steiner

A relic of the British colonization of India, Curry Powders represent an attempt by the colonizers to copy something of the colonized: When they began "going native," the British governors of India discovered what they began to call "curry," a wide variety of dishes flavored with combinations of spices—masala—that varied from area to area, and often from house to house. "Curries" were more of a category of foods, sort of a soup or stew, but the British found the spicing to be what mattered, and therefore began to mimic the spicing of these dishes by creating "Curry Powder" mixtures that have become widely known. They homogenize the flavor of curry, and as with all spices, they sit on shelves and deteriorate quickly in quality.

So what better way to combine the do-it-yourself ethos of steampunk with the multinational/integrational/fusion approach that characterizes the genre, and that with a culinary item that is unique and wonderful?

Curry powders, as said, vary greatly from instance to instance. So, it should be no surprise that the recipes you find in a quick search of the internet vary greatly as well.

The upshot of all of the recipes below is that there are some standby ingredients that seem to be in every curry powder blend: coriander, cumin, turmeric, and pepper of some variety. Additional spices, like fenugreek, mustard, cinnamon, asafetida, and so on seem more varied in their prominence, and although they definitely add additional flavors, are not necessarily deal-breakers when it comes to creating a curry blend.

Before I adjourn to recipes, a question to all of you: Do any of you make your own curry powder blends? What spices do you use, if you do?

The internet is a wonderful resource. Let's take a quick sampling, shall we?