Keralan prawn curry

It's got coconut in
Annie I'm Not Your Daddy by Kid Creole and the Coconuts

Imagine you're Dr Who and you've jumped in the TARDIS and you're going back... back... back.... It's the 1970s. You step out of the TARDIS and head off for a posh dinner. You end up packed into a heaving working men's club for your meal, before a bitter, racist comedian in a frilly shirt starts making jokes with an oh, so funny cod-Jamaican accent (see example below). You know your main course can be only one thing. You know it's going to be chicken... in a basket! Yes, it's a roast or fried chicken portion with chips and possibly peas, but you know it's posh because it's not on a plate. It's only in a basket! I mean, it's a piece of bland, factory-farmed, sub-KFC hen (though KFC wasn't about much in the 70s, even in it's original incarnation of Kentucky Fried Chicken, at least not where I lived), it's a frozen chicken portion with frozen chips and frozen peas, but it's OK, because it's IN A FUCKING BASKET! Still, I suppose it could be worse. It could be cooked in hay, for fuck's sake. Yes, hay. Some well known, expensive, Michelin-starred chefs serve up food that's cooked in dry grass, because, like, it's really rustic. Why stop there? Stick in a bit of cowshit to give it that just made in the field flavour? Maybe serve it with a side of freshly culled, organic badger chips and a drizzle of incest jus for true authenticity.

Top club comic from back in the day, Bobby Chariot
(or alter-ego of Alexei Sayle)

Obviously, that's your main course. Your dessert will have to be Black Forest Gateau. It's like the worst dilemma for your average Europhobic gammon. I mean, it's a cake that originated in Germany, has a French name, and yet, it's the nostalgia crack cocaine that was the "classy" dessert of their youth, even if it's basically just a chocolate cake with cherry jam and whipped cream.

So we've covered main course and dessert, what's the starter going to be? Well, there can be only one. It's got to be prawn cocktail. A handful of tiny prawns embedded in a turd of cloying, pink seafood sauce shat upon a few scabby lettuce leaves, half a forced tomato (with all the flavour of a raw potato), and a couple of slices of cucumber. This was most people's only exposure to the prawn or shrimp when I grew up. I mean, you could get prawn balls at your local Chinese takeaway, but that was foreign muck again. Besides, who wants to eat them weird pink cockroachy things from the sea?

The Three Horsemen of the 70s Food Apocalypse
(All that's missing is Famine, though after looking at this lot, Famine is probably not sounding too bad)
Sources: https://www.retrowow.co.uk/retro_britain/classic_recipes/prawn_cocktail.html
https://violetbakes.wordpress.com/category/chicken-in-a-basket-recipe/
https://www.thedailymeal.com/eat/if-you-grew-70s-you-ll-definitely-remember-these-foods-slideshow/slide-2

We're much more urbane now, though. You can even buy raw, frozen prawns from Farmfoods, which is a retailer only one step up from a shop selling secondhand food. Indeed, it was raw, frozen prawns I used for this dish, allowing them to defrost before cooking them then giving them a rinse under the tap. Because it's from the southern part of the Sub-Continent, this curry is quite different to the other Indian dishes I've posted before as it's missing most of the spice you'd normally associate with curry (particularly cumin and coriander), but the fenugreek gives it a proper curry flavour, as do the curry leaves. I muse on what does and doesn't make a curry here. This version of a curry is very much Indian, but with a tropical twist from the coconut, gaining something from Malaysian or Thai cuisine in character.

In researching this recipe I discovered that there are two main types of eating prawns: large, warm water prawns (or king prawns) and cold water prawns. Cold water, Atlantic prawns are caught by trawling and are cooked on landing which means they can't usually be bought raw. They taste quite good, but their flavour is quite strong (and they hold a lot of water) which means that they don't really work in a lot of recipes where you have to cook the prawns . This is the type of prawn usually used in prawn cocktail. On the other hand, warm water prawns are farmed, mainly in tropical Asia, and can be bought raw so are much better for cooking with. They taste good too, and don't get too mushy from added water, so tend to be plump, firm and juicy when cooked.There are arguments about the impact of prawn farming on the environment but if managed properly this can be minimised.

TIMING
Preparation: 20 minutes
Cooking: 30 minutes

 INGREDIENTS
2 shallots, roughly chopped
2 green chillies, roughly chopped
1 piece of ginger (approximately thumb-sized)
2 fat cloves of garlic, roughly chopped
Small piece of fresh turmeric, roughly chopped (around 2 cm in length)
Juice of a lime
1 tsp black mustard seeds
½ tsp fenugreek seeds
2 cloves
2 green cardamom pods
½ star anise
½ tsp ground black pepper
½tsp salt
Handful of curry leaves (around 20)
200ml coconut milk (half a 400ml can)
100g green beans, topped, tailed and cut into 4cm pieces
120g fresh tomatoes, peeled and chopped
1tsp sugar
250g raw peeled prawns

L

Spices
clockwise from top: salt, turmeric, black pepper, cinnamon, cardamom, cloves, anise, mustrad seeds, fenugreek seeds with curry leaves in teh centre

RECIPE
Put the shallots, chillies, ginger, garlic, turmeric and lime juice into a hand blender and make into a paste.

Heat the vegetable oil to a heavy based pan and add the spices, including the curry leaves and fry for a minute or so. The seeds and leaves should start to pop.

Spoon in the paste and cook through, stirring constantly so it doesn't catch on the base of the pan (about 10-15 minutes, when the paste starts to take on some colour).

Pour in the coconut milk and add the tomatoes and sugar, bring to the boil, cover and simmer until the beans are tender.

Add the prawns and allow them to braise in the coconut sauce until cooked (they will change colour from grey to reddish when cooked and shouldn't take much more than a couple of minutes)

In the pot

Serve up with rice and maybe a vegetable curry on the side.

Served up with plain boiled rice and a squash curry

NOTES
It's rare I can cook a dish with coconut as part of the base because Mrs Sweary is not a fan of coconutty sauces. This example, however, has a relatively small amount of coconut milk, so the flavour is not overwhelming. Mrs Sweary actually liked this.

When I was cooking the sauce, I tasted it and couldn't help thinking something was missing. I added the prawns and it turned out that they actually were the missing ingredient. 

Fresh turmeric (haldi) looks like ginger, but is a vivid yellow colour when you cut into it. You can find it in Asian grocers, but if you can't get it, use a teaspoon of dried turmeric.

Curry leaves are quite unique and you can't really substitute their distinctive flavour. If you can't find them, add a bay leaf and more fenugreek seeds.

That sickly prawn cocktail was the only exposure to prawns that the majority of the British public had in those dim and distant times, when they can be a lovely ingredient, is a tragedy. Plump, juicy and sweet and they work really well in spicy dishes, like some Chinese or curries like this one, or Mediterranean cuisine like Spanish gambas pil pil or paella.

There aren't many references to prawns in popular culture. The only one I could think about was Scampi the Prawn in the 79s kids' programme, Fingerbobs. I didn't mention it because, well, I've done way too many references to 50 year old TV shows of late, so I'll keep that one for another time I do a prawn recipe. Do remember, however, if you are going to Fingerbobs, get their consent first.

Whilst prawn reference are pretty thin on the geround, I could get a few references to coconut, such as Kide Creole's at the top of the page and this little gem from the Avalanches. This boy certainly needs therapy.

More Coconut references, but a better song
Frontier Psychiatrist by the Avalanches

Korea advice 2: Yang. Doenjang beef stew

How much is that Doggie in the window,

The one with the fine marbling through its rump?

OK, so it's time to address the elephant in the room when it comes to Korean cuisine. And the elephant I'm referring to is furry, has a waggly tail and pisses on lamposts. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm not afraid to approach some of the more unsavoury subjects related to food so, yes, I'm going there: the eating of dogs. This is something of a custom in Korea, at least according to good old Wikipedia, though it's now banned to slaughter dogs for food, yet it's still legal to eat them. Where are they going to get them from? I mean, it's not like they've got a family pack of St Bernard mince or a four-pack of Labrador burgers in Aldi, or whatever the equivalent is in downtown Seoul. I've covered cultural differences in food before, and we can't be at all judgemental about what people consume in other cultures. While we in the west think eating dogs is barbaric, Koreans probably regard putting a piece of mouldy, rotten milk in your mouth utterly disgusting. These things are very much relative, and, to coin a phrase, in the belly of the devourer. Having said that, given the current situation the human world finds itself in at the time of writing, the bats were probably a bad thing to eat.

I suppose it's not just the revulsion at the act of eating the meat of dogs, though. It's the fact that we're a nation of dog lovers and have trouble seeing them even as animals, much less food. We love our pooches. They're part of the family. True, a part of our family that licks its own arsehole and requires you to follow it around in order to pick up any crap that emanates from that same arsehole, but a part of the family none the less. Total dog lovers. Just don't mention dog fighting, puppy farms or severe in-breeding in pure-bred dogs giving them a shallower gene pool that the British Royal Family and leading to massive health problems, pain and suffering. Anyway, consumption of dog meat in Korea is apparently on the wain, whereas the UK will soon be feasting on a diet of rat tikka masala, mouse fricassee and cow pat soup when the food shortages hit following Brexit, or the North Korean Weight Loss Plan, as it could be called.

I'm sure all you readers will appreciate that the recipe, as written, has no canine content whatsoever. On the other hand, it's probably the meatiest dish you can make. Beef, mushrooms, soya bean paste. It's like the world festival of umami and is incredibly filling and satisfying. It's just like Mum used to make, if Mum was born in Pyongyang and was part of the ruling elite, as most North Koreans probably couldn't buy beef. Indeed, if news reports are to be believed, they can't buy much of anything since there are massive food shortages, as I alluded to above.

Glutamic acid

The source of umami

So, it's another long, slow cooked stew, suitable for the slow cooker. Doenjang is a fermented soya bean paste, like gochujang, but without the chilli (see my recipe for pork gochujang, the Yin to this recipe's Yang). I suppose its closest relative you can buy fairly easily on the UK high street or supermarket is probably Chinese yellow bean sauce, though they do taste distinctly different.

TIMING

Preparation: 20 minutes, plus soaking for the shitake mushrooms

Cooking: Six hours plus in the slow cooker. Three hours or more on the hob

INGREDIENTS

Flavourings

Clockwise from top left: doenjang paste, chilli, garlic, ginger

2tbsp vegetable oil (not olive)
400g cubed stewing beef

1 leek, trimmed, tailed, and cut into 1cm slices

1 thumbsized chunk of ginger, finely chopped

3 cloves of garlic, crushed

250g potatoes, peeled and cut into 2cm chunks

4 dried shitake mushrooms, soaked in a mug of water for at least 20 minutes then sliced, water reserved

225g tin sliced bamboo shoots, drained

150g fresh mushrooms, sliced

100g baby sweetcorn, cut into 2cm chunk

1 red chilli, finely chopped

2 tbsp doenjang paste

2 tbsp mirin

Vegetables ready to go

RECIPE

Heat the oil in a heavy pan, add the meat, and fry it until it has some colour, around 10 minutes.

Remove the beef with a slotted spoon then add the leek.

Fry for 5 minutes to soften, then add the ginger and garlic and fry for another 5.

Add the potatoes, mushrooms (both types) and bamboo shoots and baby corn and contiue to stir for a few minutes more.

Add the water from soaking the shitake mushrooms and mirin.

Return the meat to the pan, along with the chilli and doenjang paste.

Stir well and put in the slow cooker on medium for 6 hours or more, or else cover and leave on a low heat on the hob.

Check the post intermittently and add the odd splash of water if it looks to be getting too thick or dry

Makes more than enough for two people, served with boiled, steamed or egg-fried rice.

NOTES

Beef is the best meat for this dish, but it may work with pork or lamb. You could even get away with chicken, but might have to use a little less doenjang. In fact, add more potato, leave out the beef and you would have a very hearty vegetarian version and it could be the meatiest vegan dish you could imagine. 

This works well with plenty of vegetables. Potato really absorbs the flavour of the sauce fantastically, so you need to keep this in. Otherwise, mess about with the vegies to your heart's content. Water chestnuts would work well, as would courgette (add towards the end of cooking or it will disintegrate in the slow cooker), cauliflower should stand up to the flavour or green pepper would also work

Dried shitake mushrooms add another dimension, over and above regular mushrooms, and the water you rehydrate them in adds further depth to the stew. You could omit them if you can't get hold of them, and maybe add a vegetable stock cube plus 200ml water.

Mirin is essentially rice wine. Replace with the same amount of dry white wine or dry sherry if you can't get hold of it.

I know the whole thing about eating dogs is often used as a racist trope directed at anyone who is a member of any Far Eastern ethnic minority in the UK. It's just a short hop from this to urban legends of cats going missing around Chinese takeaways which, as well as being offensively racist, quite frankly don't make sense. Given your average takeaway probably gets through a good couple of dozen chickens on a good night, the odd cat isn't really going to save an awful lot of money, and the risk of being caught and losing business too great. Snopes has a good discussion of this urban legend here  an article that is now over 20 years old and refers to these stories from the mid twentieth century, so it's hardly new, and is just as much a load of bullshit now as it was then.

Adam and the Ants addressed eating dogs way back in the early 80s. Well, they didn't, not literally, but it was still a decent song.

It would be remiss of me not to post this track