Curry

by admin

July 28, 2019

321

The oddest weather brings on a craving for my family recipe of chicken curry. Today, it was a snarling, crashing storm, when the trees are back lit by the city lights and the wind howls through cracks in old windows.

The story of this curry is an interesting one. My great grandfather worked in French Pondicherry. His wife, a firecracker of a matriarch in later life, was a rather meek young woman and not a very successful hostess to her husband’s French bosses. I like to think she was far more comfortable with her Tamil house staff. She learnt their language, and to cook some of their local cuisine as well. Our family history came full circle two generations and some seventy years later when my father moved our family to Madras. We love Madras and by familial extension, Pondicherry.

My great grandmother’s cook made molga tanni for the staff meals. This is roughly translated as pepper or chilli water. It seems to have been a sort of rasam, from descriptions in old recipe books. Anyway, in various parts of British India, Tamil cooks toned down this fiery molga tanni into a blander version, moulgatawny soup, for the delectation of their British saheb’s delicate constitution.

My great grandmother went one better. She completely bastardised the simple molga tanni into a rich curry which she carelessly called Moltani. This is our family’s great inheritance from our French and Tamil speaking, champagne quaffing ancestor.

Moltani is complicated and simple all at once. No onions are required, for one. The cashewnuts and khuskhus seeds and coriander seeds have to be roasted to perfection. Too little time on the pan and the curry will taste washed out. Too long left on the heat and it will have a bitter after taste that no amount of lime can disguise. The grated coconut and roasted coriander seeds have to be boiled and the milk extracted three times. By the time the last of the hot coconut has been squeezed into a colander, the cook’s hands have turned red and sensitive. The final and most crucial step is the grinding to a fine paste of the cashews and khuskhus. I remember my grandmother, first generation inheritor of this recipe, standing, all diminutive five feet of her, arms akimbo, directing the house boy as he sat over the old black grinding stone. Grind it till you feel sleepy, she would order him. It was only when the khuskhus released its opiate oils that the paste was deemed fine enough to be added to the curry.

Ginger. Garlic. Curry patta. Chilli powder. Salt. Those are the only other ingredients needed to turn the coconut milk and cashew khuskhus paste into heaven.

Only chicken may be added to this curry. Anything else has never been attempted, in living memory. No one messes with my great grandmother or her recipe. Chicken preferably with the skin on. So that at the end of the cooking, a fine layer of red fat floats on top of the gently bubbling curry.

Like many great dishes, it tastes better the next day. The flavours meld and infuse the chicken and all that is needed is steaming white rice and a squeeze of lime. This is best eaten at lunch, with a nap scheduled for afters. That khuskhus paste is guaranteed to send the happy luncher into deep slumber.

My best memory of Moltani is the first time I cooked it. The year was 1991, I think. It was Raksha Bandhan and my three rakhi brothers and three girlfriends were invited home for lunch. We ate a lot of Moltani that afternoon. Post lunch, we headed back to my room where the three boys jumped on the bed which promptly broke under their combined weight. It was some months before they showed their faces around my home again. My dad was left puzzling over a hitherto sturdy but broken bed. It was the Moltani, I swore to him. His years of the Moltani experience made him reluctantly agree. Yes, it must have been the Moltani.

My fiesty great grandmother most likely would have delighted in that story.