The Quest Continues...

I signed off the other night with an answer to Steve's comment on the post Traces by saying that my quest to recreate the glorious tastes of Birmingham Anglo-Indian Madras curries in my own cooking continues to this day, as much in thought experiment as in actual empirical trial these days. I think I have a potential modus operandi, which draws from my experience and recipes, various authors on the subject, and my pretty detailed flavour memories of past lunches and suppers eaten around the West Midlands in the days before I moved here in 1980. My recall of flavours is pretty strong even at this distance in time, and I can group them into roughly three categories, depending on the restaurant.

My favourite Madras curries were from The Light of Bengal and The Khanapina in Edgbaston and a takeaway on the Bearwood Road - whose name is lost to me - in Birmingham itself, and The Shah Bagh in Dudley, where I often took lunch as a hungover student. All of these had similarly dark, very lightly thickened sauces with a subtle top note of anise aboard a well-balanced sweet/sour onion and spice base. The second grouping includes a place in Selly Oak, the restaurant next to the old Jacey Cinema in Birmingham city centre, and a restaurant at the very bottom of Stourbridge town. All of these made Madras sauces with a softer top note of cinnamon leaves, the one in Selly Oak particularly.

The last category was the lunchtime curry from a desi sweet centre at the bottom of Dudley Road where it merges into Cape Hill on the Birmingham/Smethwick border as it was then. This was fully authentic and not Anglo-Indian and so did not have 'Madras' as a part of its beautifully short menu. Their standard sauce was characterised by a deep and sweet onion gravy however, which lies at the heart of all the others mentioned. As my old college mate [and best man] Jim always said: 'You've got to get the onions right...'.

Pictured: my notes, atop which is a rather yellowed recipe for Jalfarezi that I concocted back in the late eighties, based on a memory of a very fine lunch I ate at a restaurant called Khans, somewhere in west London, a year or two before. Next: the empirical trials resume, upon which I will report here in detail as they progress. Keep you posted - hwyl!