Does anyone consider dry cooked tandoori meats to be a curry?
For me a curry always has to have sauce. Chiken Shashlik is lovely with Nan but I wouldn’t call it a curry.
Also would you call Taka Daal, or Sag Paneer curries? I just think of them as side dishes, even if the meal is made up completely of those things.
But Mutar Paneer is a curry from my perspective, since it has the spicy sauce with the cheesy-peas.
If it doesn’t come in one of those little bowls - it’s not a curry - it’s an Indian.
I’d like to see a source on this analysis, because I wholeheartedly disagree. Curry leaves do not taste at all, IMO, like a curry masala. Curry leaves have a slightly citrusy, warm flavor that’s a bit hard to describe. And it doesn’t really make any sense to me that the spice mixture is trying to duplicate the taste of a curry leaf as a) there are so many different masalas, from fragrant to spicy, all with distinct character and b) southern Indian dishes that call for curry leaves tend to also use a masala with them. Curry leaves are used a bit like, say, bay leaves are in Western cooking.
When invited out for a ‘curry’, I simply assume we are eating at an Indian (or Bangladeshi) restaurant. (This would include Tikka dishes without any sauce.)
I would use ‘Thai’ because there aren’t so many of those restaurants here, even though they serve curried dishes.
I don’t expect that Asian curries have a lot of meat.
Anyway Rogan Josh is a curry dish with plenty of tomatoes.
Yes indeed. And this dish was invented to satisfy an Brit who asked for sauce with Chicken Tikka. The chef used tomato soup, cream etc and made up the name. 
And this is probably the red coloured dish you asked about!
Next, Owlstretchingtime gives a typically accurate British dining experience for the younger set. :eek:
However some of us older chaps eat much earlier, drink only mineral water and ‘retain’ our meal.
I have done some research. The super glow-in-the-dark red dish was Makani which is no longer on the menu of any of the local take-aways or dial-a-curry places I can get my hands on. Possibly because of this stuff :eek:[sup]2[/sup] (again)
And maybe in owlstretch’s tree frogs. What the frelling smegging fek have we been eating?
Trust me my old china - I’m bloody old, I just don’t learn.
I should also point out to our non-brit readers that Britain has many extremely good high-quality, and high-price, Indian restaurants that wouldn’t be seen dead knocking out chicken tikka marsala or Vindlaoos.
I have one near me - Sarkhlels - that I can’t recommend too highly.
Independent reviews here:
[Hijack] In my small town of Cleckheaton (just outside Bradford), we have the Aakash, World’s Largest Indian Restaurant!!! .
[/Hijack]
That sounds about right. A few months ago available light and I made an authentic red curry with pork using a hardcore Thai cookbook. It was good, but man what a pain in the ass. It took literally the entire day, and quite a lot of pounding and grinding on the mortar and pestle. Next time I’ll probably leave out the pickled bamboo shoots though, I didn’t care for the taste.
Time for more than you ever wanted to know about Indian food…
Tomato is definately found in Indian dishes. Just like the Italians, Indians discovered that tomatoes grow great in their soil and add a lot to their sauce-based cusine. You can find tomatos north and south. A typical “green salad” is a plate of cucumbers, tomatos, and onions with a lemon.
Tomato soup is extremely common, and can be found in most restaraunts large enough to have a menu. Many Indian kids consider it comfort food. While “chicken tikka masala” may be a British invention, the use of tomato soup isn’t that unnatural- it’s akin to an American cook coming up with something using a cream of mushroom soup. A dish called shahi panner with a tomato-cream sauce is pretty common, even in places that tourist would rarely venture. I’d be interested to know if shahi panner (which as far as I can tell is identical to paneer tikka masal) is a recent British invention or not.
Ketchup is also hugely popular, and is served with many fried snacks. In an odd circular turn of events, ketchup bottles declare themselves “Chinese tomato sauce”.
Makahni is usually a dark dal dish with a tiny bit of cream. Dal just means “lentil” and Indians use about fifty million kinds of lentils.
In India, most veg dishes (and most dishes are veg) are listed by their main ingredients and do not specify what kind of spices and sauces are used. The exception is plain paneer dishes and dal. All dishes are served either with rice or bread and I never mastered knowing what goes with what. Dry dishes are rarely ordered on their own, and I had more than one waiter yell at me for trying to order just a dry dish (Don’t you want gravy, madam?)
When you go out to eat in India, you get a few choices. The first is what we usually find in restraunts here- mughal food. This food hails from Muslims in northern India, and is considered “fancy special occasion” food the way we might have considered French cusine in the fifties. If you go out to a nice dinner, it’s probably to a mughal restraunt. These dishes have rich cream sauces, use fruit and nuts in savory dishes, lots of meat options, and tandoori dishes. Mughal food is rarely all that spicy. The Indian restraunts found overseas are pretty similar to the mughal restraunts found in India, although I don’t think any of it represents “authentic” food that is eaten all that often in Indian homes.
Having a huge menu is pretty traditional. Most cheap restraunts have amazingly huge menus listing a full array of Indian, Chinese and pseudo-contintental dishes. It’s not uncommon for them not to be able to make half the dishes or to see a little boy run out and come in ten minutes later with a basket of the ingredients for the dish you just ordered.
Almost all desserts are from Bangladesh. Bengali sweets are widely aknowledged across India as the best.
The other main option is South Indian, which you see a lot less here. South Indian restraunts typically have a set period of time in the middle of the day where they serve thalis or more commonly “meals”. A meal is a very cheap all you can eat affair served on a palm leaf or a metal tray (often lined with a palm leaf) with a huge mound of rice in the middle, up to seven or so side dishes (always including sambar, a tangy soupy dal and rasam a peppery water and a coconut chutney or two [they taste kind of bland- not sweet at all] and sometimes yoghurt). The food is often very spicy and is eaten very actively with your right hand- it involves a lot of mixing and mashing and balling up rice. When it’s not “meals” time, South Indian restraunts serve dosas, very thin spicy pancakes often stuffed with potatos and other snacks. Coffee is as common in the south as tea, and is served sweet and milky. In Northern India, South Indian food has the status of, say, Chinese food here. Most malls will have a South Indian eatery or two and "exotic’ themes are played up pretty heavily.
Interestingly, most the chai I found was plain sweet milky tea- not the spiced masala chai we find here. I only found masala chai in a few restraunts.
Kerala and Goa cusine have many influences due to being heavy trade areas. The best meal I ever had was fish smeared with some wonderful spice mixture, steamed in banana leaves, and served up expertly at the table in Kerala. These dishes are hard to find outside their respective states. Street food is usually local specialties and varies widely according to where you are.
Chinese food is also very common- most cheap restraunts have a full Chinese menu (although Chinese-only restraunts are uncommon), and it resembles neither American Chinese food or Chinese Chinese food. You can even find Chop Suey and “American Chop Suey” (which I gather is chop suey with a fried egg on top). Most Indian Chinese dishes are either noodle dishes or “Chilly” dishes which is meat or whatever served with green peppers. You are given a dish of ketchup and a dish of green chili sauce and sometimes a couple other sauces to mix in to your food (I got strange looks when I refused to pour a bunch of ketchup in my chow mein.) Chopsticks are rare. I can’t really think of the equivelent here. It’s something you find everywhere, on almost every menu. The closest thing is Mexican food in the Southwest. You can get “Mexican omlettes” at Denny’s and tacos at Burger King.
Finally, you can get “normal” Indian food at roadside truck stops. This food is hearty, cheap, good, and geared towards large amounts. Usually you get a dal, a mushy vegetable or two (when I was there it was usually okra or potatoes), and a pile of rice or chapatis. It isn’t bland, but can get pretty repetative. This is probably most representative of what most northern Indians eat in their homes. It doesn’t make it in to restraunts overseas often because Indians don’t think of it as “restraunt food”. Most women are highly skilled cooks so there ins’t really a market for “homestyle” food the way there is here. When I took my Indian friends to the great “totally authentic” restraunts I found, they complained that it was poor peasent food and why would they want to go all the way to a restraunt to eat that?
Finally, you can find some pretty amazing things in tourist restraunts. A lot of tourists make their way through India teaching tourist restraunts their cusines in exchange for free meals. The Israeli food is pretty right-on (and about the only way to get physically cold food- it can be hard to take a constant stream of steaming hot soupy dishes in 100 degree heat), continental food strays towards the somewhat bizarre (Jam and vegetable sandwiches, strange pasta concoctions, plates full of sauted mushrooms), and the Mexican food resembles nothing on this earth (mostly because the only widely availible cheese is paneer and they just can’t get tortillas right- also, probably due to British influence- baked beans make their way into “Mexican” dishes). My dream is to travel across India showing tourist restraunts how to make decent Mexican food.
Oh yeah, if you are in London, I highly reccommend visiting Chor Bizarre . It is a great restraunt with a lot of aptmosphere and high quality dishes from all around India. The menu itself is a work of art. It was one of my favorite “fancy night out” restraunts in Delhi (There a full meal for three might cost an astroniomcal fifteen dollars 
).
That’s why I posted this in GQ 
Thanks for your answers everyone: it appears it is as I suspected, that it’s just something that’s really popular in Britain.
We have a large Indian community here. We eat in one of the authentic restaurants about once every two weeks. These are mostly vegetarian and feature buffets for around $4 or ala carte chaat, which I’m surprised nobody has mentioned. They also often sell paan, which is a snack-type thing based around the mildly narcotic betel nut. Correct me if I’m wrong about any of this; I know only from eating at these places for years.
The buffets usually feature saag paneer, rice, salad (with raw jalapenos, the predominant regional pepper, sliced lengthwise which look deceivingly like green peppers – ouch!), daal, chana, and a few more vegetables – potatoes, aloo goti or another paneer dish, or a yellow curry that they like to make with pakoras. Sometimes they have stuff like small uttapams and sambar. The $4 gets you naan and papard (papadums). Some restaurants have a more expensive buffet that includes a dosa.
I usually get chaat, which I take it is akin to Indian street or fast food. Dosas are a type of chaat, I believe. I haven’t seen much of this except in very authentic restaurants. I usually either get pani puri, kachori, sev puri, or bhel puri, but there are dozens of other kinds.
As even sven mentioned, it seems that most traditional Indian food is not based around the curries which dominate the $10-a-plate and up restaurants around here. There are very good ones of those, as well, including one which features a huge menu including Indian Chinese food (and very good seafood, which is not that common apart from the standard prawn curries).
It’s funny you say that, because the Indian students I’ve met here in Morgantown really love Taco Bell! When I asked one of them why, he said mostly since there’s so much vegetarian fare on the menu and plus their food generally has quite a good bit of spice to it (my friend called the Fire sauce “Indian ketchup”).
Of course, that might be because they haven’t said there was a really good Indian restaurant here in Morgantown (for the Diwali festivities, at which I had a great time BTW and the first time I tried Indian food, they had to order from a place in Pittsburgh)…now have to get them to try my favorite Mexican place, Mad Mex.
Not just Britain. Indian and Thai restaurants are pretty popular in major US metropolitan areas with a cosmopolitan population (New York, Chicago, Los Angeles). I never thought of it as a British thing. I’ve been going out for Indian food here in the US for the last 20 years.
Well, here’s a tip for ya. Rather than grinding everything into a paste (and damn is it difficult to grind lemongrass), why don’t you try this. Use your favorite premade Thai curry paste and add whatever fresh ingredients you have to the mix to liven it up. I usually add fresh garlic, chiles, lemongrass and sometimes galangal (or ginger) to liven up the flavor. I also like garnishing with fresh basil or cilantro. Just a couple fresh ingredients will do wonders to freshen up a curry.
There is a little restaurant in Ise that serves a seafood curry that’s to die for. A few weeks ago, I drove for a good two and a half hours just to go there. There’s also a place close to where I live that does something they call “Italian curry”. An abomination perhaps, but a pretty tasty one.
Strictly IME, expats are very often clueless about the real good food spots in Japan. (And, yes, I am an expat.)
Just as you wouldn’t judge the quality of hamburgers in America by what McDonald’s sells alone, not all Japanese curry is like that of Coco Ichi. (And taken as fast food Coco Ichi isn’t that bad.)
That’s a bit like saying that shoes are popular in Britain, or tea, or rain. “Indian” curry is part of the furniture here - some of us could not imagine life without it, or consider life without curry as hardly living at all (back me up guys).
Chinese/Thai/Mexican whatever, is nice once in a while but curry***** is a vital ingredient of British life. Every high street has at least one Indian-restaurant/curry-house.
*****Indian curry that is, did I say that before?
You know, I work in an Indian resturant and I hate when people ask what ‘curry’ dishes we have since everyone seems to have a different definition of curry!
The three main definitions that people have (which have already been covered in this thread, but I want to make sure I am not missing any others) are
Nice set of wheels, John!
I was going to adapt the saying “You’re only as old as the woman you feel” :eek: to curry consumption, but I haven’t found the right setting yet…
Do you deliver? 
Is there a discount for SDMB members?
I think there is a genuine problem here about defining ‘curry’.
It’s generally a term to describe a type of restaurant where the English have taken a cuisine of the Far East, and adapted it to their ‘meat and two veg’ culinary base served by ‘Indians’ (who may well be from Bangladesh’).
As we know, Chicken Tikka Marsala is the most popular English version of ‘curry’, yet it isn’t a traditional dish.
I could thus challenge all three definitions above: