Here on campus, we have a brand new conference center and hotel, where I park. There’s an open sewer right across from it… or at least, an inlet for water runoff that appears to carry raw sewage. When I’m walking past it and that first hit reaches my nose, I swear it’s like having my face next to a defecating ass. (Sorry for the visual.) That’s one smell that will stop me in my tracks, and I instantly hold my breath.
But generally I agree with you!
The problem with thinking it’s okay “once in a while” is that everyone thinks like that. So you only cook curry once in a while, and the person next to you only boils eggs once in a while, and some other person makes kimchi once in a while, and the person next to you cranks the stereo once in a while, and the guy in the parking lot revs his motorcycle once in a while, etc etc. So pretty much at any time there is something loud and something stinky.
In my personal opinion, people living in close quarters should be hypersensitive to the effects they have. They should not be loud enough that their neighbors can hear. They should not cook foods that their neighbors can smell. They should not leave unsightly things in public areas, etc. Wouldn’t it be nice to come home and be able to relax in solitude without hearing thump-thump-thump through the walls and smelling the odors of several different kitchens?
And dude, you were in a dorm. College kids are totally self-centered. The only thing they care about is themselves. They couldn’t care less that they might hurt someone’s feelings by saying “What stinks!” Just like you couldn’t care less that you were stinking up the hallway.
For those people that are aroma sensitive, aroma is a big deal. I get migraines from certain scents. Definitely lying in bed wishing I was dead interrupts what I was doing and makes things like keeping food down difficult.
However, other people really don’t need to run their lives around my tendency to get a migraine. My triggers are not common ones - most people apparently find lavender to be a pleasant relaxing smell. If I lived with a roommate who felt the need to aromatherapy constantly with lavender - I’d have to ask her to stop or make other living arrangements if she wouldn’t. Or I’d have to medicate (which I prefer not doing).
(I’m also gluten intolerant. Eating gluten gives me gas, bloating, headaches. But my diet is my problem - not the problem of my dinner hosts. My son is lactose intolerant - once again - that’s his issue - not the person holding the slumber party planning on pizza. He brings Lactaid or he brings something he knows he can eat.)
But that doesn’t seem to be what Hippy is talking about anyway - people getting ill from certain smells. He is just talking about people not enjoying certain smells. Had someone come up to him and said “every time you cook whatever you cooked last night I get a killer headache and end up in bed for the night - I think its the smell” maybe he would have stopped. Or maybe him and the person approaching him would have reached an accommodation (I’ll only cook curry when you are gone for the weekend - let me know and I’ll plan around it). Or at least there would be some justification for the hostility thrown his direction if he’d said “suck it up.”
I really don’t understand where you got the idea that he “couldn’t care less.” He described, in detail, the pains he went through to minimize the impact of his cooking on others. He was cooking in his own room, not a common kitchen. He doesn’t want to eliminate curry altogether, though, which not the same as not caring less. I just can’t see where there’s an excuse for telling someone, “Your food reeks!” unless it’s actually rotting and posing a health hazard. Seems to me like the juvenile whining of bratty college students, who don’t like exotic smells but would think nothing of blasting their music or burning incense. I say this as someone who lived in the dorms for 4 years of college.
Here’s where I have an issue. Statements like that are just a short step away from the kind of things that drove me nuts in California. Where I lived, they implemented rules like, you can’t park your trailer or RV on the front third of your property, you can’t leave a car parked in front of your house for a week while you’re on vacation. They started restricting the color you could paint your house, and the styles of fence you could build. BAH! If you don’t like looking at my trailer, don’t look at it.
Oh, I absolutely understand and agree with that (I get nasty headaches and sinus problems from some perfumes). But allergies and medical issues aren’t what I was talking about.
However, that didn’t seem to work. The smell still permiated the hallway. If he’s not able to contain the smell, he shouldn’t be cooking it. If he really needs to get his curry fix, there are plenty of restaurants that would be happy serve him.
That’s my point about college students as well. They’ll complain about someone playing their stereo too loud and then immediately turn around and crank theirs to 11. The fact that the smell was ‘exotic’ is irrelevant in this case.
I don’t know where you’re getting “permeated” either. The smell made it out under his door into the hall. I bet if he were making tomato sauce, or broiling a steak, those much more acceptable smells would also have reached the hallway. It’s tough to contain those odors in a dorm. Once he was finished with his meal, the smell very likely disappeared. That is a minor inconvenience at best, in a dorm full of them. Do you think they were justified in telling him his meal “reeked”? I don’t. If they really needed to complain, which frankly I doubt, there are a lot better ways to say it. Or, as I and others have said, suck it up and realize that you, too, probably annoy or inconvenience people with your personal effluvia at times, and live and let live.
I don’t think it’s irrelevant, because as I said, if Hippy Hollow were frying bacon, or making pizza, no one would say it reeked, even if the smell was just as strong. The fact that it was a strong smell that wasn’t familiar to them is what made them say it reeked, IMO.
Congratulations! You’ve just described communal living. That’s what’s supposed to happen. All of these things are permissible as long as some consideration is shown. Except maybe the motorcycle thing; what purpose does that serve?
So your solution is a prescriptive sterile living environment. I submit to you that nobody wants to live in such an environment. I described upthread a woman who claimed she could hear her neighbors’ stereo even when it was at “3” - literally just above the sound of a whisper. What if the girl next door likes a certain perfume? What if the guy down the hall has a really garish poster on his door that you don’t like?
Who is the arbiter of what is “too much,” and who has the right to say, “Pack it in, that’s bothering someone?” I was often in the middle of these debates and it’s rarely as cut and dried as “turn your stereo down.” Communal living is all about give and take, and barring violations of noise hours policies or agreed-upon dorm rules, you have to be flexible.
Nice broad brush there. In my eight years of working in residence life, I actually find myself thinking that most students I encountered were quite respectful and did think of others before they acted. Most. Plenty of exceptions, but rarely can I recall anyone who just didn’t give a fuck. It was often a blind spot or just being a little oblivious (like the kid who was practicing bagpipes one afternoon… I do not think he had a clue that people three floors up could hear. We talked to him, he apologized, and practiced in a music room from then on out).
I feel sorry for those folks who think the fact that someone is perturbed by something you do that affects the senses means automatically that you have to stop, especially if it’s important to you and of significance - and you have taken precautions to minimize the impact on others. There has to be some measure of reasonableness. Again, I raise the issue of posting here on the SDMB. Let’s say I decide that your username is stupid, and the things you post about are stupid too - and I state this in exactly those words. At what point do you stop posting because I’m bothered by it?
I would prefer that my neighbors have zero impact inside my apartment and minimal impact in common areas. My preference is that I don’t hear or smell my neighbors within my apartment. That might sound sterile to you, but it’s what I would prefer. And I assume it’s what most people prefer. I mean, who wants to hear their neighbors and smell their food? However, most people don’t want to make the sacrifice to not impact others.
When I lived in an apartment, I took my shoes off and walked around softly. I would keep the tv/stereo at a low volume or use headphones. I didn’t cook things that would waft up to the other apartments. However, not everyone does that. Some neighbors tromp around in hiking boots, blast their 5-channel Dolby surround sound, and cook up sizzling fajitas. And there were people who thought nothing of working on their motorcycles in the parking lot, reving the engine however much they liked.
I have no problem with you decorating your apartment or cooking whatever you like as long as it doesn’t invade my personal space. If the smell only is in the hallway, that’s no big deal. But if you feel entitled to have your smell enter the hallway, you can’t get offended when people comment on it. If you don’t want the comments, don’t let the smell escape.
There is a significant difference between living in an apartment and living in a dormitory. Maybe there shouldn’t be, but having lived in both, I can say that other people’s lives intruded on mine MUCH more in the dorm, probably due to the sharing of all space except one’s sleeping quarters. It’s impossible to expect zero impact when you have hundreds of people, most of them 21 or under, living together. Curry smells would rank low on the list of annoying intrusions of other people’s identities, IME. Almost everyone will be tolerating someone else’s irritating behavior at some point. Live and let live would be my policy, unless you are actually being harmed in some way.
Wow, I read some (not all) of the replies to this thread, and I am floored at all the hostile comments about Hippy Hollow and his/her cooking. He said he uses the kitchen fan. Beyond that people have no right to complain. Hippy Hollow has a right to cook ANYTHING he wants. It’s not as though he has a vat of rotten meat in there. It’s actual food.
If the students don’t like it then they could perhaps try to be constructive about it and see if they can get a stronger fan for Hippy Hollow. But that would be up to them to get and install the fan, presuming Hippy Hollow agrees to it.
But I doubt that it truly bothers them so severely that they would get off their butts and buy a fan.
That’s why I think this is really a crypto-racism issue. If it has been bacon sie was cooking and not curry, and sie came in here to complain that people had said hir bacon “stank,” I doubt anyone would be siding with hir rude housemates.
I don’t know what “sie” and “hir” are, and I’m not sure if it’s crypto-racism or not, but your essential point is interesting. I wonder if a vegetarian or vegan posted this thread in reverse, saying she or he lived in a dorm and someone kept on cooking bacon. The smell offends the vegan, and she complains. Would Dopers be sympathetic or would they tell her to stop whining, because everyone knows bacon is dee-licious? I can predict the outcome of that thread sight unseen.
Am I being whooshed here?
You need to try curry in all its forms postehaste.
Sweet curry, coconut milk curry, spicy curry, fish-head curry, green curry, red curry and more.
And do remember it’s not just Indian curry, there’s also Thai, Chinese, Indonesian to name but a few.
And then there’s also a “western” take on curry - I remember when my den mother used to make it with left over lamb, raisins, apple and some other stuff (heh - I bet many easterners are gagging now) - it was delightful.
“Sie” and “hir” are gender neutral terms. Sie means he or she, and hir means his or hers. Personally, I prefer Fred Pohl’s terms, used in the last story of The Years of the City. However, it really is time that we tried to move beyond using either the masculine or plural terms to describe singular humans who might be of either sex.
This thread is bizarre, mostly in that almost everyone seems to be skimming the OP and then posting without reading anything in between. We’ve had at least two people saying that they’ve never had curry, one who said that s/he wouldn’t recognise the smell, and yet still people are banging their heads against the wall of “it’s curry, it’s not exotic, everyone knows what curry is”. Anyway, that’s a side issue. The main thing people are jumping on is this image of **Hippy ** as sitting in the hallway making a big pot of saltfish and ackee while the poor students fainted away all around from the smell. He was in his OWN kitchen, with the window open, fan on and boiling aromatics which are generally considered neutralising and pleasant. WHEN HE OPENED HIS DOOR some self-centred twat asked him, “What are you making in there, it reeks”. Until his door opened, there is no evidence that the smell was apparent to his neighbours. However as soon as it did open, someone thought that the appropriate thing to say is that it reeks. That’s just rude. There’s a woman at work who eats something which smells worse than shrimp paste and vomit mixed together and burned. I would not ever, on any account, go to her and tell her that her food stinks or reeks or makes me want to hurl. It does, but when you’re a civilised person, you find civilised ways to say things. I contend that the complainers, who Hippy has pointed out were the minority, were not genuinely upset by the smell, nor were they put out by it in any long-term way. They just decided it smelled “weird” and so they thought they would comment negatively. Because they were arseholes, that translated into actually insulting the food and the person who cooked it. At no point has Hippy said that the people were wrong not to like the smell; it was the way they complained that he had a problem with.
Finally, to equate the smell of carefully prepared, edible food with the smell of body odour, as someone did earlier, is also offensive to the food and the cook. Body odour is caused by bacteria, generally. The scenario you described was one of a lack of cleanliness. It was a hygiene issue. A fine West Indian curry is not the same as the smell of your sweaty crack.
Hippy, it may be redundant to say this at the end of this post, but for what it’s worth, I think you did as much as should have been expected of you to minimise the impact on others, who should have been more grown up about it anyway (what the hell is wrong with the smell of curry? You people are weird), and I do not think you should have changed anything you were doing. The people who insulted you were the ones who were wrong.
I’ve noticed that the questions I’ve posed to the “stop cooking, you blackguard” gang haven’t been answered. What’s the threshold for you changing your behavior? Is it enough that I am, or anyone else is, offended/annoyed/pissed off by what you’re doing, regardless of how I deliver the message, and what you do to minimize the impact on others?
So if I say your posting and username suck - in that way precisely - are you under obligation to change what you’re doing?
I find your comments interesting. You use the most polar example - people stomping around in hiking boots, revving motorcycles - and you’re on the opposite end, taking your shoes off in your own living space and listening to headphones. Might I suggest that both approaches are extreme? If I live in a dorm or an apartment, I expect that I will hear, see, smell you at some point, and that’s okay. Anything can be done in excess, but sterility is a frankly unachievable (and unreasonable, IMO) goal.
To reiterate - I’m not on a mission to get people to like curry. It doesn’t bother me one way or another. But you can share your unfamiliarity or dislike in a constructive way. And I submit that to me, the comments I heard were quite hurtful and disrespectful. It’s like the poster that said someone told him that Westerners smelled like sour milk. “We” smell a certain way because of our diet, our hygiene habits, etc. Saying “Westerners stink” is an insensitive indictment of cultural behaviors. Saying “Westerners smell different than people where I’m from” is pretty neutral, and interesting.
Apparently, we’ve heightened “dude, it reeks” to the level of “would you mind turning that down?” - a complaint. Forgive me if I’m not in a hurry to get on board that train.
SmashTheState says this is a crypto-racial issue. I might not go that far, but there is a lot of culturally hegemonic projection in here. Some folks take issue with my cultural insensitivity hypothesis; fine. But yes, there’s a lot of hostility directed toward me in this thread, from posters I didn’t know I had any preexisting issues with, and I think it’s because I dared to raise the idea that there’s some cultural slighting going on. (Really, cooking curry makes me an asshole?) Just my $.02.
ratatoskK gets the point, and truthfully, if someone was that bothered by it I’d cook somewhere else! I really think it was someone who was ill-mannered and didn’t have the vocabulary to simply say, “that’s an interesting aroma.” Again, nobody ever came to me and said, “The smell bothers me.” It was “it reeks in there!” Personally, when I smell food I’m unfamiliar with I tend not to tell people that it stinks (even if it does in my mind). The only intelligible comments I ever received were: “hey, that smells like my grandma’s cooking,” “that reminds me of being in Malaysia,” that kind of stuff. Hardly a panning of my culinary skills.
bengangmo, I’m not even there with you. I don’t think anyone is obligated, or should try curry unless they want to. I agree that different curries are radically different in texture and flavor. My Japanese buddy made really runny curry. Jamaicans (at least the ones I know) like our curry thick. And I’ve had Indian curries that smell great but don’t taste anything like the ones I’m familiar with.
Teacake, thanks. I usually know when I’m posting something controversial… but yeah, I think there was a lot of stuff thrown at me in this thread and I can’t figure out why… btw, I despise ackee and saltfish… even though it reminds me of family reunions. 
Rubystreak, I think that’s a good analogy. I’ve known a lot of vegetarians/vegans, and they put up with a lot of omnivore-centric stuff. If you lived in a dorm and complained of the smell of grilled burgers, you’d probably be carted off on a funeral pyre. Heretic!
This thread reminds me of one of my favorite Dickinson poems:
Regarding the gender-neutral pronoun issue, one board I visit is fond of the “hu” construction. Me, I say use “him” sometimes, and “her” other times. If anyone cares, I’m a “he,” but not offended by being mistaken for a “she.”
So, Hippy, can we have a recipe?
Anyhow, as to the OP, I’m a little torn. If somebody says my food stinks, I don’t really give a shit. But if I’m living in a communal situation and enough people sincerely complain, like if somebody takes me aside and says “dude, it’s fine you like cabbage, onions, and bacon, but it’s really stinking up the hall,” I would change my culinary habits for the sake of domestic peace. So it really depends on how it’s being presented to me.
But, seriously, recipe please.
The difference is that my approach (no impact on neighbors) is more universally fair and unambiguous. We are all inconvenienced in an equal way with a clear understanding of what is a problem situation.
In your approach, who gets to decide what is too loud, too noisy, and too smelly? You? How often is too often for curry? Once a month? Once a week? Once a day? How long can the smell linger in the hallway? In the the neighbor’s apt?
Or do the neighbors decide as a collective? You’ll never get consensus. There is always an a-hole or two who thinks 10 is an acceptible stereo volume. Some people want to cook curry 2x per day. Some people will want it to be less, some people will want it to be more.
Sure!
I tend to just toss stuff in my curry, so I hope this makes sense. Make sure you have ventilation because curry does “cling.”
I start with the curry powder. Usually I buy it instead of making my own. I prefer Blue Mountain (Jamaican) or Chief (Trinidadian). Bottom line, if you want West Indian curry you need to get West Indian curry powder. You also need a big pot - what we call a dutchie (or Dutch oven). But any big pot will do. Make sure it’s stainless steel or Teflon, or it might become permanently curry-stained.
I’m a meat eater, so my protein of choice is typically chicken. Get some of the drumettes, sprinkle liberally with salt, pepper, and rub with curry powder. Let it sit while you get the other stuff together.
Peel a couple of potatoes, a couple of carrots. You can add other veggies as you wish. Occasionally I’ll drop in broccoli and cauliflower florets. Generally, the harder the veggie the better. If I use bell peppers or tomatoes they pretty much disintegrate. Put these to the side.
Next. chop a big-ass onion or two. Peel and mince a 2" piece of ginger. Chop up a shitload of garlic (6+ cloves). With your powder at the ready and some milk, drop in some fat (either butter or oil) and fry up the ingredients, adding curry to taste. Add the milk so it gets to a pastelike consistency. Now drop in your seasoned protein and saute until it’s browned.
Drop the heat on your dutchie. I usually add two cups or so of coconut milk. This stuff will stop your heart, so you might want to look for the lite stuff. Let it heat to a slow boil. Now you can drop in the veggies. You might want to put in the longer cooking stuff first (carrots, potatoes) and as the cooking time progresses you can drop in the more fragile stuff (bell peppers, etc.).
That’s the prep. Now add a bay leaf or two (do not eat!), and a handful of allspice berries (or pimientos as Latinos call them - don’t eat these either; they’re for flavor). Incidentally, eating that stuff will not hurt you; they’re just a little strong tasting. As it’s simmering, you need to taste and add curry powder, salt, or soya sauce to your taste. (Soya sauce is Jamaican soy sauce, but you can go with soy or Worcestershire.) I forgot to mention heat. It’s your call… I have not cooked curry with fyah (hot pepper) in some time because I almost always make it for folks who are not accustomed to the heat… but if you are, WEARING GLOVES, seed and chop a few scotch bonnet peppers or habenero and drop them in as you add the coconut milk. Do not drop them in when you are sauteing the chicken or you will asphyxiate yourself! Add as many or as few as you like. You can add Tabasco for a milder effect, or chopped jalepenos.
Hopefully you have at least an hour or two before you eat so the flavors can meld. If it’s still runny, temper in a cornstarch slurry to thicken. That’s it!
Serve on a bed of rice, or with rice and peas. Roti or pita bread is a good side as well. Red Stripe also strongly recommended.
Except, I’ll argue, it isn’t possible. Invariably you will do something that will alert the neighbors to the fact you exist. Then what? Even if you could come close, what kind of life is that? You live somewhere for nine plus months, and you never play your stereo without headphones? No radio in the shower? No friends over (because when you talk, you’ll make noise)?
It’s called community living. It’s understood that you make efforts to minimize the impact, as I did. I didn’t make curry once a week; more like once a month, with lots of ventilation, etc. And then we assess. You can let me know if something is causing a problem for you and vice-versa. But there also is an understanding that you can’t have it your way 100% of the time. I don’t know where you live, but occasionally skunks get around here and they spray, and the smell lingers. Not a damn thing you can do about it; you just live with it. If we can somehow survive skunk spray, I’m certain we can survive each other’s cooking aromas.
Exactly. We have quiet hours, but during the day it’s okay to play your stereo. Now if it’s cranked up to 11 that may never be appropriate, and a neighbor or staff member might have to advise you to drop it down. Food is a whole other story. If you don’t have a meal plan, and your apartment comes with a kitchen, are you not supposed to use it? You just need to take appropriate precautions (running a fan, ventilation).