Hi Mamta,

Many thanks for this excellent site. I have tried several of your

recipes and they are fantastic.

I have a question which I hope you can help with.

In several of your recipes, you use the phrase 'Fry until oil

separates', or something similar. I have never really cooked before and

I wonder if you could tell me what this means (what to look for and how

long it usually takes to happen). As a beginner, I am okay if told to

fry something for a certain amount of time, however, I don't have a lot

of confidence in my ability to judge things unless they are very

obvious. I believe I am probably not frying for long enough to avoid

burning in some cases.

Thanks again,

Nik.

Glad you like the site...

Normally when you are cooking a curry, after a while the oil seperates out of the mix and appears on top of the rest - I presume this is what Mamta means

Hi Nick

Thanks for your mail and I am glad that my recipes help you. Let me try to explain the phrase 'Fry until oil separates':

When you fry say ground onion and tomato paste for making a curry base, oil is not visible separately from the rest of the stuff to start with. When the mix is fried enough and it is ready (to move to the next step), you will see that the oil seeps away from the solids that you are frying. In other words, the 'oil separates' from the bulk. In Western cooking, you only saut? the onion, garlic etc. In Indian cooking, they are cooked for much longer, until the oil comes off the bulk. It is somewhat similar to saying that fry something until it begins to come off the pan.

It needs a little patience. Don't give in to temptation of turning the heat to maximum, you will only burn it.

I still remember clearly when years ago, my mother used to ask us to stir-fry things until 'oil separated', we used to find it too hard to wait and often added the next ingredients too soon. This often gave the curries an 'unfinished/raw/half cooked taste!

If you are nearly burning (your curry base), your heat is too high, turn it down a bit.

Mamta

I've found if you saut? the onion and then use a stick blender to pur?e them, the will really absorb the spices when you add them... works wonders in a rush.... (and if you want some solid bits of onion you could always add some after blitzing)

I understand WHAT oil separating is. But I don't understand WHY one is supposed to do it.

Hi Phil

It is just a way of recognising that onions/spice mix is fried enough. The whole bulk begins to come off the pan/oil or ghee separates. If you don't wait until this stage, the curry tastes slightly 'unfinished'. I can't explain it any better!

Mamta

Hello Mamta,

Does this matter with yoghurt-based dishes?

We did the separation last night with a yoghurt-based Indian dish, and what we got was oil floating on the surface of the sauce. I couldn't see that it tasted better than our saut? method. I'm probably missing something here.

Phil

Hi Phil

Yes, you are right. The oil will float to the top of curries generally. In meat curries, I quite often remove this excessive oil from the top. A little has to be left (I am told), because it gives curry flavour. Stir it in before serving.

No, I don.t think you are missing anything here. The difference is only subtle. If you don't feel the difference from 'saut?' method, continue as before . Afterall, nothing is written in tablets of stone as far as cooking is concerned :-)!

Perhaps I too should call it 'saut?' until onions are dark brown/spices come off the pan'! It is just that in Indian cooking, I have grown up hearing 'cook until oil separates'. I notice that many modern Indian chefs these days do use the word saut? until....., but I am not sure that most Indians living outside the cities of India and less exposed to 'master chefs' of India will use the word 'saut?'.

Mamta

I think you should continue to say "fry till the oil separates". As you say, it is a traditional way of describing a stage in the cooking, and it is quite good NOT to sort of blur the edges. The problem with using the word saut?, which is a french word borrowed from the verb "Sauter" to jump, is that it has quite specific meaning in French cooking, namely to shallow fry, usually in butter and/or oil over fairly high heat, and with a lid on. You stop the meat (because the word saut? is nearly always applied to a meat dish) burning by holding the lid down firmly and shaking the pan vigorously - making the pieces jump around.

The generic English word for what one does in Indian cooking is "fry", or if it's done slowly "sweat". The use of "saut?" for "fry" is american, and as such I think it's an error to use it in either Indian or English. In American cooking terminology, "Fry" is only ever used for deep fat frying.

Grin. Sorry about the pedantryt, but I HATE the creeping blurring of cooking terms.

All the best

Ian

Hi Ian

Thank you very much for this information. I am glad to know that what I am describing is correct.

Mamta

I found Ian's reply interesting. I was surprised to read that one uses a lid when saut?ing (we live in France, and cook Indian, Chinese and French food). I checked out 'saut?' with my wife, who isn't French, but Walloon (French Belgian) and she says that she never uses a lid when she does saut?. Elizabeth David (French Provincial Cooking) doesn't mention a lid either.

That's perhaps a trivial point (though perhaps of historical interest: my wife thinks that saut? might have involved a lid in the past; she feels that, now, with watery meat, you'd risk stewing the meat if you kept a lid on during the saut?).

Less trivial is Ian's point about not blurring boundaries. I'm not sure what I think about this. On the one hand, cooking is a cultural practice, and these get blurred as a matter of historical fact, often to good effect. On the other hand, I find some kinds of fusion/blurring of practices (and terminology) undesirable. For instance, I prefer to retain the use of cream in spinach for French cooking, wherzas I avoid the use of cream in Indian dishes with spinach.

I wonder what others think about fusion of practices? I've only recently realised that I've been doing a kind of suat?ing in Indian food for more than 20 years.

Cheers

Phil

Hi

Replying to Phil. Thanks for your comments. I should perhaps have said that I'm an ex freelance chef, specialising in French Haute cuisine food, and that therefore my perspective is very traditional. I should also perhaps say that when I first left home at the age of 19, about 45 years ago, my first neighbours in a flat where I lived in Notting Hill Gate were Indian, and that they taught me how to cook what they ate at home, so I've been cooking Indian food even longer then French food!!

Saut?ing. There's no doubt about the derivation. So classically, saut?ing is as I described it. When I taught cooking about 25 years ago, I used to do a saut? chicken, to show my students how to carry out various techniques, jointing a chicken, chopping onions correctly, and how to saut?. Your point about the increased moisture content of meat nowadays is quite valid, it's due to the fact that it's rarely hung enough. However, even with that taken into consideration, it's perfectly possible to saut? with the lid on without the meat stewing, it's all a matter of getting the temperature right.

If you care to look up some of the classic dishes "Poulet Saut? Bercy, for example, or Entrec?te Parisien, or Scallopine alla marsala, all these are saut?s, and what they have in common is that they are all made from quick cooking (normally thin) cuts of meat. The idea is that you sear the meat very quickly in high heat, check to see if you've burnt the cooking butter and throw it away if you have, and then continue cooking over slightly lower heat, covered. The whole idea is to carry on the cooking process as evenly and as rapidly as possible, without burning either meat or fat. If the pan is uncovered, there is too much heat loss and the meat doesn't cook more or less evenly on both sides, and if you have the heat high enough to cook quickly enough, it will burn. When I'm saut?ing a chicken, after the initial browning, I cook the brown meat some 5 mins, add the white meat, and the main cooking is done in a further 5 mins or so. A little liquid may have come out, but it's in no way serious. You remove the meat, and keep it warm while you finish the sauce. This will involve pouring off most of the fat, deglazing with chopped something (onion, shallots, mushrooms or whatever) and then adding liquid (cream wine, stock etc) which you boil down really hard. Once the consistency of the sauce is satisfactory, you add in the meat juices again, boil down further if needed, correct seasoning and finish with butter, or herbs or whatever. Serve immediately. The whole process is really fast, and having a covered pan is essential to ending up with meat that's perfectly cooked without being too dried out.

My references in this are works like Escoffier, Pellaprat, Larousse, or, coming down to earth somewhat, "Mastering the art of French Cooking".

The fact that Elizabeth David, or your wife's family or your neighbours may not know how to saut? correctly (sorry) (or in the case of Elizabeth David, didn't explain exactly what is involved), merely goes to show how important it is NOT to blur the differences. Frying isn't saut?ing, and saut?ing isn't frying. They're different, and they give different results. I'd never dream of trying to saut? bacon, or sausages!!

I agree that cooking evolves - if it didn't we'd only ever roast on a spit in front of an open fire, and call anything cooked in the closed moist heat of an oven "baked" for example. There are hundreds of examples where dishes have evolved, and a few where basic techniques have changed as well. But, to take another example, there are cases where common usage has changed - but wrongly. Boil and simmer, for example. Simmering implies a water temperature of about 90C, odd bubbles will rise, the water will be shivering, but there will NOT be a continual stream of steam bubbles rising and very little water will be lost to evaporation. Yes when you read 90% of modern recipes, when they call for simmering, they actually MEAN boil, if you look at subsequent instructions about volumes of liquid. And that is most misleading, as the two cooking methods can give very different results.

Coming back to indian cooking, and frying onions. If you WERE to try to cook finely chopped onions at the same sort of speed you use to saut?, you would never get the right results in your finished dish, instead of being cooked very well right through, your bits of onions would be browned on the outside and not fully enough cooked in the middle. I've got some recipes where you cook onions like that, they're delicious, but they don't taste the same, and they don't thicken a sauce in the same way that onions cooked in the indian way do.

So evolve names and descriptions as much as you like, but only if the differences in results are negligeable. A name means something, or certainly should. If I go into an indian restaurant and order a Pilau, I expect to get rice, not potatoes. What's more, I don't expect to get a Polo from Iran, a pilaf from the Middle East, a Risotto or a Paella. They ARE different, and the names should reflect what they are. Equally if you serve (in French cooking) a "coq au vin" you should respect the meanings of the words in the title. Coq means Cock (as in Cock a leekie) Vin means Wine (as in fermented grape juice). A recipe that doesn't have those two ingredients cannot be right.

Hope that clarifies things a bit

ATB

Ian

Many thanks to Ian for that response; I've learned a thing or two there. I'm still not sure what I think about 'fusion' issues and blurring. Yes, I suppose 'Coq au vin' SHOULD have a coq, but I've got so used to having this only ever with chicken that it never bothered me. But perhaps this underlines Ian's point: given that all of the 'coq au vin' I've ever had has been made with chicken, I've never actually experienced coq au vin! And perhaps that's a bit of a shame.

Cheers

Phil

Hi Phil,

Please forgive me if the last seemed a bit absolutist. It wasn't my intention. I think I ought to explain why I think it's important that coq au vin should mean "Cock in wine". Very briefly, this time, and with apologies to Mamta for hijacking this away from Indian food, though there are parallels, I feel.

The biggest difference between a cock and a roaster is that the former is tough as old boots. The cooking technique is designed to make it tender. Correctly, one should marinate it in wine for a few days, then, after frying it lightly, and flaming (to get rid of some of the excess fat) you pour over the marinade and cook it. A counsel of perfection would have you cook extremely slowly an hour or so a day for 3-4 days. At the end of this, the cock is tender but NOT stringy. Simmering or - worse - boiling all in one go tends to make it fall apart and go stringy.

With this very long simmering and marinating, the wine turns into the most sumptuous sauce. You simply cannot get it right with a simple simmer for an hour or so. I've tried. OK, it's not that easy to get a cock, and one can more or less make it with a boiling fowl, which again need long simmering and is helped by being marinated. It's not the same, however, because the flavour of the basic meat is different.

So the reason I am pedantic about the name only being given to a dish in which the two fundamental ingredients are used, is because anything else tastes quite different. It's not bad, simply different. And coming back to saut?ing. There is as classic dish "Poulet saut? ? la Bourguigonne", where you cook burgundy wine down very hard over a quite a long period (ideally with a carcase) and you use that to finish the chicken saut?. Garnish with the classic burgundian trio of button mushrooms (fried in butter) glazed button onions and fried lardons (little 14" square matchsticks of bacon, and you have a dish which is significantly better than "Coq au Vin" as normally found, because you've treated the main ingrdients (chicken and wine) sympathetically. But it ISN'T Coq au vin.

And what's that got to do with Indian food? Well, how many of us ever use mutton for the long cooked indian mutton dishes which abound in dishes from the subcontinent? I've got a recipe which I call "Gopa's Mum's meat curry". If it's cooked with lamb, the meat starts falling apart before the tecture of the dish becomes right. When cooked the amount of time you have to cook mutton, it's transformed. What's more the quantity of spices called for in the recipe, suddenly come into balance with the much stronger flavoured meat, instead of swamping the lamb!!.

So I'm really NOT being purist for the sake of it, but because I think it's reasonable to assume that an experienced eater should have a pretty good idea of what they're getting, from the name! And blurring prevents that in the case of names of dishes, and can sometimes spoil/change beyond recognition a dish in the case of techniques.

All the best

Ian

(Thanks for your patience Mamta)

Ian, Phil,

Thank you both for this really exciting and interesting discussion.

I have really enjoyed reading your comments and thoughts.

To add to what has been said, I would say there are two different situations and my reaction to the idea of blurring and blending depends on what one is attempting to achieve:

If one is attempting to recreate a traditional recipe accurately, then I do agree that it's important to understand and correctly use the techniques given, and also to use the correct ingredients. As Ian has said, it's not that the results will be unpalatable if one fails to do so but that the results could not accurately be described as the dish one was attempting to create.

I think there's a lot of value in retaining our understanding of what a true and traditional ghoulash or bourgignonne or coq au vin are actually like.

However, there is also value in taking traditional dishes and altering the ingredients and techniques to one's own taste and creating something new. I love fusion cookery, when done well, and I love to see recipes evolving. What I would love to see though is these new recipes described as such as not passed off as traditional ones.

So instead of calling that chicken in red wine "coq au vin" perhaps it should be described as "poulet au vin" and perhaps that indian curry with a twist should be described as a variation on a traditional recipe.

Of course, what confuses the matter even more is that, whilst with some of the traditional french recipes there's a higher (though not absolute) degree of agreement on just what the ingredients and techniques are, there is much less agreement on THE recipe for lamb curry even within one small region of india, let alone across the entire country. Even if one narrowed it down to a recipe for one variety, such as a roghan, one would find as many recipes as families. So if each family can have their own recipe, and that recipe be considered traditional, then who is to say that modern variations on these recipes are any less traditional? Where does that line lie?

No answers but am very much enjoying the discussion and the thoughts it has provoked.

Kavey (Mamta's daughter)

Helo Ian, Kavey, Mamta, and everyone else

I've been noting down Ian's instructions for a real coq au vin. There's an old French lady who lives over the hill from here in the South of France who can probably give me a coq, so I may well be on my way to my first real coq au vin. (She lives on her own out in the sticks, surrounded by countless pigeons, geese, ducks, chickens, and the odd cockerel; we buy a goose from her at Christmas and roast it).

But then, what is 'real'? What is 'authentic'?

I think I understand Ian's main point, and I'm sympathetic to it. I also appreciate the views of a professional with much experience (I'm just a bloke who likes cooking at home, as does my wife).

But I'm still not clear in my own mind what I think about 'fusion'. Even if we accept Ian's points about being clear as to what exactly we mean when we say 'coq au vin' or some specific Indian or French mutton dish, if we accept that there can be, not only fusion of ingredients, but also fusion of techniques, where does that leave us? Perhaps Ian has made an important point about not confusing techniques, as opposed to fusing ingredients?

Cheers

Phil

Hi Phil and Kavey,

(Nice to have a new face on board). I'll start by answering Kavey, if that's OK with you, Phil, though I'll probably be addressing some of your points as well.

I think we're all agreed about not diverging too far from classical recipes. I very much take the point you make about "classic" indian recipes, where one might best talk about a "sheaf" of recipes. You mention one of our favourites, Rogan Josh. I think it's meaningless to say that "This is the one true authentic recipe" and admit of no variation. I'd never do such a thing especially with a recipe from such a vast country as India. Quite apart from everything else, as I understand it, Rogan is also traditional in Kashmir, but is cooked quite differently (no onion and loads of yoghurt) and tastes quite different too. I am sufficiently manic to use Kashmiri Chili powder when making Kashmiri RJ, by the way. However, RJ is NOT Pork vindaloo, and no amount of insisting upon culinary freedom and so on, should let anyone tell us otherwise. So clearly, it is quite legitimate to say "this and this and that" are the determining factors that make the dish I've just cooked "So and so" and to insist that if I left out the onions, a Dopiaza would be a nonsense.

France is tiny, compared with India, and much of its cooking is highly regional. So a regional dish such as Coq au vin (OK, I know that there are several different versions from different regions, but here I'm talking about the most famous - arguably the best - from Burgundy) is going to be more tightly defined by regional tradition. What wine would a Burgundian use? She's not going to pull out a bottle of best Bordeaux, is she? She'll probably go down to the cellar and use some of the red that's being used to top up barrels of the current year's crop, rather than open a bottle. If she's a perfectionist, she'll probably use a good class wine, rather than plonk. So that gives a guideline. To make an authentic coq au vin "dans les regles de l'art" , use a decent but young Burgundy. I'd not say it's going to be inedible with a Cahors or a wine from Languedoc, but it WILL be noticeably different. So if Phil is going to go mad and get Madame down the road to kill him a cock, then I'd have thought he'd find it worthwhile going the extra step and using the wine that will give the most traditional results. He may not like what it produces, that's perfectly legitimate, but at least he knows that he's done it by the book and it's not a matter of compromise that has let him down. So, yes indeed Kavey, one can and perhaps should treat traditional recipes from France slightly more strictly than

their Indian counterparts.

As for the chicken in wine often made instead of Coq au vin, I do have a very real problem with it. It's actually not that wonderful, IMO as the wine simply hasn't cooked long enough. So I'd much prefer people not to attempt the recipe with a fryer. Do the saut?, as I said, because that truly IS delicious. But, yes if one insists upon making it then "Poulet au vin" would at least warn me! (I'm a miserable begger, aren't I!)

Now, turning for a moment away from traditional cooking, and considering french Haute Cuisine. Here you have a completely different situation - I don't know to what extent it exists in India, though I suspect that it does ("Lake Palace Hotel's Aubergine in the Pickling Style" from Madhur Jaffrey might well be an example). A great chef has created a dish. She's (let's not be sexist!) worked on it for several months/years to get it as good as she knows how. She gives it a name to honour someone (in the case of Tournedos Rossini, he wanted to give HIS name to it). How DARE you or I mess with it. Am I a better chef, that I can change one detail of the recipe? No, such a creation should be adhered to exactly if you are going to use the name given by the creator. However - to allow for legitimate creativity - nothing should stop any of us playing with the recipe and seeing what we can do with it, but we should NOT call it by the classic name in that case. Call it Tournedo Kavey, if you like, and you find it successful, why not?

By the way, I ADORED (as a half hungarian) your misspelling of the hungarian dish guly?s. "From ghosties and ghoulies and things that go bump in the night, good lord preserve us". (It is goulash in Austria, who sort of nicked the recipe).

Turning now to fusion cooking. I'd want to say about this that it's a FAR older thing than we imagine in our late 20th century early 21st C perspective. For example, I have a recipe for a French dish made with aubergines, walnuts, shiitake mushroooms, soy sauce and lardons and some other ingredients. It was created WAY back, probably in the 19th century as a deliberate attempt - rather in the way that the Prince regent built the Brighton pavilion - to incorporate chinese thought into western cooking. The style is called "Chinoiserie", and shows just how far back "fusion" cooking goes. I love it, by the way. So I have absolutely no problems with the way in which, in Australia for example, creative chefs are using ingredients from Asia (coconut milk or lemon grass or chillies) with western style cooking methods and possibly even indigenous (kangaroo fillet or yabbies or Moreton bay bugs) ingredients to create something entirely new. Go to East@west in West St, where the chef there (sorry, forgotten her name) is doing just that. But she's not passing it off as being classical french, nor using classical or traditional names for her inventions.

As to whether she's making a success of it..... That depends upon how you judge it. I went there with my brother and my wife and we each had one of the three set menus, which we rotated so we each had a taste of each dish. Most of the dishes were good to very good. One or two were truly magnificent (always IMO, of course). The menus - considered AS menus, were not as successful as the individual dishes - judged by the chefs stated aims. So I'm ALL in favour of creativity as long as one doesn't lose sight of what it is that we're creating. (I'm on a soapbox here.) We're not creating great visual art, nor poetry. We're creating food. Yes, that's probably obvious to those of us reading here, but not necessarily to people like Ferran Adri? despite his reputation as erstwhile "best chef in the world".

Food is about taking basic ingredients and making something from them. That's so blindingly obvious that some chefs lose sight of it. What is better? To take carrots and after cooking, pureeing, mixing with flour and egg and god knows what, turn them into a kind of wafery lollypop, flavoured up with spices and herbs, or to take magnificently flavoursome young carrots, and serve them as a nibble before the meal with a tiny grind of sea salt, to sing about what it is to be a carrot. I want my cooking to sing of the things I make it from, not of my cleverness.

Finally - your ARE patient if you've followed me down to here!! - to talk about being faithful to techniques. Can I talk about a Rag? Bolognese? In Bologna, they take aromatic vegetables, sweat them down with butter (yes!) until their juices are rendered and evaporated, and then wine is added three times, being boiled dry each time. Then a mixture of coarsely minced meats is added to the vegetables, as well as tomato puree and the whole is cooked for about 5 hours to develop the flavours. Now I often make Lasagne, and I use a meat sauce which is based on that. I don't call it a Rag? Bolognese because I make several important changes (olive oil, beef and concass?e tomatoes amongst others - I prefer it like that), by the way. However, the point of this comment, is that I do my reduction of wine in the microwave. NO one could possibly say that such a change is traditional. However, I have found that it greatly reduces the risk of the vegetable mixture burning, the process is faster and I can be getting on with the preparation of the meats and the tomatoes, while the reduction is taking place without having to be stirred all the time. I have absolutely NO problems about modifying techniques if the results are as good, or better.

Coming right back to "cook the onions till the oil separates". I'd have absolutely NO problems doing this in the microwave, once the initial softening has started, as I suspect that it would be highly successful in arriving at the right result. Stir frying the onions over very high heat doesn't, and that's the most important point. Calling such a technique by a precisely defined french term which is different is also an error, partly because it muddles what we understand by the technique and partly because there's no NEED to use (incorrectly) a term when another describes the process perfectly.

Wheew..... Now what shall we talk about!

I would quite like to send Phil my recipe for Coq au Vin, but by no possible stretch of the imagination could this be considered on topic for this board. Kavey or Mumta, what would you suggest?

All the best

Ian

Hi Ian, thanks for the next installment - yes we followed all the way through and no it wasn't boring!

I should mention btw that whilst new to this discussion I'm not new to the site; I'm Mamta's daughter, Kavita, and my husband and I are the ones, for our sins, who designed and created the site and continue to maintain and develop it further. We do it in our spare time so it's a slow progress, as our patient regulars know! :o)

Am glad my spelling amused! :o) By the way, goulash (rather than ghoulash, as I mistakenly put it) is the spelling commonly used in the UK in both cookery books and restaurants. Where a dish is widely known in the UK I tend to use the UK version of the name rather than the original language name, just because I think it's clearer (for those who share a common heritage with me) than using the original language name which is relatively unknown here.

That said there can be confusion when the origins of names and dishes are lost - I recall trying to explain to a fellow traveller that, no, the people of Bologna didn't refer to their spaghetti with mince sauce as Bolognaise but as ragu. It simply got that name outside of Bologna. And another conversation with another individual about what the americans refer to as Baloney, a corruption of Bologna sausage, and the ensuing explanation that in Bologna itself there were many different kinds of sausage all with different names, none of which were Bologna or Baloney, was definitely a losing battle on my side.

You catch my points exactly in terms of my having no problem at all with the development of recipes, provided they are not thought of or presented as traditional versions (where agreement on such a thing exists). Indeed it can be hugely disappointing to order a dish one knows and loves well only to be served something completely different. Boeuf bourgignonne without mushrooms anyone!!!

I am an avid francophile but without the depth of knowledge that you have, yet still love to sample the traditional cuisine of the regions. It's one of the main pleasures of visiting. At least it still remains possible in France to easily find traditional dishes being cooked in traditional ways, whereas in the UK that's become almost impossible. I do at least speak the language fairly fluently so we've been able to buy a few cookery books and muddle through the instructions quite well.

As for your comment on Chinoiserie, oddly enough it's a subject I studied in passing when I was at university, where I studied French & History. Not French history specifically, as it was a joint degree between the two departments. One of the best history tutors we had was a Mr Scarisbruck, author and expert on the subject of the establishment and development of European trade and colonisation around the globe. Even my poor husband (boyfriend at the time) recalls that essay as he had to type it up for me as I wrote it, so late was I in handing it in. And my good friend too, I submitted it and received a B, she submitted the same essay the following year and was given an A for it!

Kavey

I meant to add, please do provide your recipe for Coq au vin to us via email. Provided it's not taken from a copyrighted cookery book, which I doubt, having read your inputs so far, we'd be happy to have it on the site, with your name as recipe author.

Whilst the site is predominantly Indian, because that's where mum is from, there are many non-Indian recipes here too.

Kavita

Hi Kavey,

Thanks for your suggestion to send in my Coq au Vin recipe. As I always do in my recipes, I've tried to write it in such a way that explains every stage in some detail. That tends to make them a bit long, but I hope would allow someone who's not much idea of what the dish ought to be like to cook it and get excellent results. Any way, it's sent. Although the basis of the recipe was from Mastering the Art..... the ingredients and method and wording are all mine. There's no such thing, really, as an entirely new recipe for a traditional dish.

By the way, when I welcomed you, it was meant to be to the thread. I sort of realised you were part of the family, though I'd not realised how important a part!

You say that it's still possible to find traditional dishes in France, while hard in the UK. I have always found it next to impossible to find decently cooked examples of British cooking in restaurants, and of course that's why restaurants cooking so many other ethnic cuisines have taken such a hold there.

More later. Jacquie has just come up with welsh rarebit for lunch. It won't wait.

ATB

Ian

Hi again,

As I was saying, I've never found it easy to get decent English food in restaurants. Some pubs sometimes serve it, and occasionally they can be quite good, but I've found them few and far between.

That's changing nowadays, it seems to me, though more because English food is being adapted to be more restaurant friendly. If you think about it, it's not exactly easy to do a rib roast and have it a) available from 12.30pm to 2.pm in perfect condition, and b) affordable and c) to be sure all the accompanying vegetables and so on are also in perfect condition. Yes that's probably THE most typically British of luncheon main courses. Many other traditional British dishes are also singularly badly adapted to restaurant cooking. All that to say that I don't think it's altogether right to put this down as a recent phenomenon. I think it's always been true, really. Certainly for the last 45 years anyway, and probably for the last 65.

French food, on the other hand is much better adapted. Partly because much of it was created in restaurants - so it's logical that it would work well there. Partly also because the very typically French braise (yes in the UK you have the pot roast, but that's often designed to be timed almost as precisely as a real roast) is one that cries for being cooked in advance and reheated. And the same goes for quite a lot of traditional french dishes. I'd argue that the same is true for much indian food, which means that one can have a wide range of dishes available, which can easily be reheated at the last minute. Yes, I know that sadly, all too often that's not what actually happens, but it could.

Coming back to the ease of finding traditional french food in restaurants, I think you'll find that's less and less true. Partly because some European legislation has almost made it impossible. (The length of time a cooked dish may be kept, and may not). Partly because the fashion has changed and partly because many french food guides seem to have taken a hate against it, so will never recommend a place that specialises in it. My problem is not so much a matter of whether you get mushrooms in your Boeuf Bourguignon, as to whether you can even get it at all, with OR without mushrooms.

Lastly, I don't disagree about using local spellings of dishes from another country, if it will avoid ambiguity. That said, a real guly?s lev?s is so wildly different to the dish that has come to us from Austria, that it is almost worth keeping the different spelling just for that reason. But I'll not pursue that topic.

All the best

Ian

Ian,

I think there's a surging interest in traditional UK recipes - a natural consequence of the interest in foreign cuisine that's been prevalent for so long. The more recent side of that trend has been centred around peasant/ country/ authentic recipes from countries such as Italy and I think that it's finally ignited an interest in the same thing from within our own traditions.

Kavita

Ah, hadn't noticed or read your latest reply when I posted the one above, let me stop and read that and see if I have anything to add...

Kavey

Yes, I agree, one of the main difficulties in serving traditional British dishes in restaurants is that many of them really do require serving as soon as they are cooked. Since most involve long prep and cooking times and also don't respond well to sitting around waiting and being reheated this does present a challenge.

Soggy, reheated Yorkshire puddings definitely don't appeal to me, that's for sure!

That said, there does seem to be a greater awareness of food and it's preparation and customers are more and more prepared to wait a little longer for their order if that means it being cooked freshly for them.

That should make it easier to do some traditional British dishes in restaurants at least.

I have seen an increase in popularity of traditional British puddings - sticky toffee pudding has always been popular but it's now more common (in London, anyways) to find various of the traditional sponge puddings and others on menus in "classy" restaurants. I'm sure the efforts of the Pudding Club (in whose hotel we stayed for a few days recently) have also had a hand as they have had regular press coverage in the UK since their conception 10 years ago.

Anyway, please do do do stay around and start/ join some more rambling discussions - very enjoyable.

We'd also appreciate your contributions of recipes and pointers too!

Kind Regards

Kavita

Dear ian

I have read your postings with interest.

Thanks for sending your recipe. It looks delicious. I have gone through it and sedning it back to you with request for minor changes, to make it easy to follow. Please read it and send it back to me.

Mamta.

WOW thats some passion over one dish.. !

Hi AskCy (I hope I got the name right)

Thanks also to Kavey and Mamta for their warm welcome and the tolarance they showed towards my completely hijacking a perfectly harmless thread!!

Yes, you're right about the passion, but it's not just about one dish. I think most people have some subject about which they care passionately. My particular passion happens to be food. It shows up in many odd ways - for example, I have a real horror of the way in which names get blurred. I have already chatted about coq au vin. Here's another example.

I run a B&B in the Correze and often get asked to cook local dishes. One of these is "Clafoutis". I don't know if any of you have heard of it, but it's a sort of sweet version of toad in the hole, made with cherries. In fact in this area - which is probably where it originated - it is made with the little local wild black cherries.

Throughout the region there's a very similar dish called Flognarde. That can be made without fruit, or with any fruit. So far so good. However, increasingly I read recipes for "Clafoutis of cherries" (superfluous as a clafoutis always has cherries) or worse "Apple clafoutis" (no, it's an apple flognarde). So what? Well, because the dishes, while both very good, are also very different. The REASON this is true, is because if you make a clafoutis correctly, you never ever pit the cherries. So as they cook, the juices stay inside. So the finished dish consists of a rather bland batter, with the juicy slight tartness of the cherries making a wonderful contrast, along with a real crunch from the sugar which is always sprinkled over the instant the dish comes out of the oven. The fact that the cherry stones are present forces you to take care while you're eating it, and concentrate upon what's in your mouth. With ALL other fruits I've tried, they always burst - even the tiny mirabelle plums, and their juices run out into the batter as it cooks. So the dishes really ARE very different, as different as chalk and cheese, and given that there's a perfectly good generic name, I feel it is quite wrong to hijack the specific name as if it were generic.

Here's a more obvious example from British cooking. Pickles. That's a generic name for a range of vegetable/fruit relishes, right? One of these is called Piccalilli. It's a specific relish, made from a number of well described vegetables and containing quite a lot of mustard. Now imagine what would happen if the specific name "Piccalilli" were to be hijacked and used for ALL pickles, simply because it sounds better and more poetic.

So yes, I'm passionate about lots of things.

ATB

Ian

Ian

I actually agree with you on names being used incorrectly... whilst it's true that usage of language evolves, to my mind, that should happen only to increase the accuracy of communication, not to blur or dull it.

I originally did languages - before I became a geek I did French at uni - and I've always been interested at how the usage of language does evolve. Sometimes it can make sense - the old usage of a word has been superceded by a new word or been made obselete by changes in society and the word has been appropriated to mean something else. Other times it's frustrating to me because using an existing word wrongly causes confusion - is the user intending the original meaning or the newer meaning? Suddenly the word no longer stands for one clear item or concept but for more than one and we've lost the ability to accurately refer to either of the two items or concepts uniquely ever again.

Hence why I'm definitely into fusion cooking and also into adjusting recipes according to one's own taste but also prefer to see these new or adjusted recipes titled accordingly. So that boef bourgignonne without mushrooms would perhaps be better referrred to as a French-style beef casserole.

That coq au vin recipe is certainly something - mum made some changes then sent it to me. It took me a few hours to fully edit it - some instructions I just reworded a little, others I rewrote and re-ordered quite a bit so I'm glad you are happy that it is an accurate rendition of the ingredients and steps involved.

Whether anyone is dedicated enough to invest the time and effort required to make it is another question entirely!

Kavita

PS Discussion forum threads often evolve - and those evolutions can be an unexpected pleasure, no?

From last posting by Kavita:

"PS Discussion forum threads often evolve - and those evolutions can be an unexpected pleasure, no?"

Yes indeed! And what fun!

Ma (mamta)

Hi Kavey,

You said

"Whether anyone is dedicated enough to invest the time and effort required to make it is another question entirely!"

That's a fair question, to which I'd add "and money". I suppose it is down to perceptions as to what's time and effort well spent and/or ill spent. Much of the effort in the UK would be in getting hold of the coq! It's hard to find and expensive. I suppose it's reasonable to ask oneself whether it's worth it. I don't think I'd do it in the UK, though here in France, where a coq is more reasonably priced and relatively easy to find, I do make it from time to time.

As for the time and effort in actually doing the cooking. It's much less than you might think, readng the recipe. There's much more work involved in doing the marinade & garnishes than in the main dish itself. I suppose it would take about a quarter of an hour's actual prep work for the marinade. Cutting up the coq took me 15 mins as well. Once the beast had marinated, I spent perhaps 20 mins frying, flaming and bringing to boil. From then onwards until I had to make the garnishing vegetables, I suppose I spent less than 5 minutes a day on it. You pop it in the oven, programmed for an hour's cooking. Assuming a working couple, it would be intelligent to do that as soon as you come home. About 1/2 hour before going to bed, you'd take it out and put it in cold water (30 secs). When you go to bed you put it in the fridge. The real work is involved in cleaning the mushrooms and peeling and glazing the onions, to be honest.

If I'm making a kashmiri rogan josh I guess I spend about as much total time on it, but all at one time. I found that it took about an hour to an hour and a half, what with cutting up the meat, preparing the spices, and then adding and reducing a pint of yoghurt a bit at a time before simmering, the last time I did it. If I'm making an assortment of indian dishes, (starter, meat, rice or chapatis, dhall, a couple of vegetables and the assorted bhurtas and fresh chutneys and pickles that you've got to have) for the two of us to eat for a while, or for a dinner party, then I guess it would easily take me all day.

As I adore food from the subcontinent, I think that's time VERY well spent. But I could well understand some one who's busy deciding that it's simply not worth it and just calling out for a take-away!

The question that often gets ignored when discussing time and effort in cooking is "and what do you do with the time otherwise?" If it's watching TV, or going out to the pub, or otherwise frittering the time away, then I can't see the advantage in it! (Of course I'm supposed to be retired here and don't work an 8 hour day for a wage - during the summer when we have lots of visitors, it's often nearer a 12 hour day ;-)). But as I've said to askCy, I AM passionate about food so I don't count or resent spending a couple of hours making Imam Bayildi or for that matter Gordon Ramsey's Honey/soy roast belly of pork. Especially living here in France where the TV here is so naff, it makes "Big Brother" seem like Shakespeare.

Grin

Ian

Ah, but was it authentic Welsh Rarebit!!

Hi,

I found this web page when I was trying to research what stops the oil from separating in the curry

I have been cooking Indian restaurant style curries for years at home, and I LIKE to see the oil separate.

I usually cook curries using a puree made of onions, garlic, ginger and tomatoes, (in water) which I simmer for a long time in a pan, and then liquidize it, and that is used in the curry with meat or chicken, and oil and spices and salt.

I usually use a fair amount of oil, BUT, sometimes a good amount the oil floats to the top of the curry, and sometimes there is hardly any at all.

Can you tell me what I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,

Brad

Hello Brad

Welcome :-)

I am not sure of the scientific reason, but my mum always taught us not to be impatient when cooking. She said to wait until oil separates from the mass, whether frying onions, onion and tomatoes or onions, tomatoes and spices?. When this happens, you know that the excess water is gone and the things are properly cooked, releasing their flavour, not leaving a ?raw? taste in the mouth.

Indian restaurant style curies have a lot of oil and a lot more onion/tomatoes/spices than most of my recipes. If a dish has a lot of gravy, it goes a lot further with less of main ingredient. This probably saves them money!

If oil hasn?t floated to the top in a meat/chicken curry, perhaps it needs to cook a bit further.

Hope this helps?

Mamta

Hi Mamta,

thanks for your reply, I will see if it will work better if I cook it for a bit longer,

your advice makes sense, as sometimes when this happens, when the curry is served I sometimes see some watery liquid seep out from the edge of the curry

I guess I am probably putting a little too much curry powder in, and will try putting less in and cooking or longer.

Many thanks,

Brad

"I guess I am probably putting a little too much curry powder in, and will try putting less in and cooking or longer."

It is always better NOT to use too many spices, they drown the flavour of the main ingredients you are cooking. A good curry doesn't have to be too spicy or too hot, contrary to some curry house myths. The flavour/taste of your main ingredient should always be clear, in front, not drowned in spices or chillies.

There is a youtube video of Madhur Jaffrey's Curry Nation which was on tv recently, she visited a Kashmir family in Yorkshire and showed how to seperate the oil.

Here's the vid, hope it's ok to post a link to youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdIlsDi29YU

They start cooking it around 4 or 5 minutes in.

Btw I enjoyed reading all the previous off topic comments :-)

I cooked onion, ginger, garlic puree last week and after a few minutes it turned green, I was shocked hahaha, but persevered, as I cooked it further drying it out and it turning a darker colour I got too impatient and added the meat, but the end result tasted far better than just my usual method of frying with not very finely chopped ingredients.

Just found this also (still eploring the recipe's)

http://www.mamtaskitchen.com/recipe_display.php?id=10139

Which I think explains it quite well, though maybe seeing the oil seperate on the video or just by being patient and doing it that way will give more confidence.

Yet to do it properly myself and I'm going to make the Basic Curry Sauce today.