I used to think that South Asian food was what I was eating in “Indian” restaurants. What really changed my mind was when we went to one of those underground secret supper clubs and spent an evening eating home style Punjabi food. If nothing else, it taught me that Indian food does not have to have masses of chilli, nor does it have to be swimming in gravy. Now I seek out restaurants which do something different from the “any protein with any sauce” so called Indian restaurants with their Identikit Anglicised menus. So, Mumbai street food, Gujarati vegetarian dishes and the like is what I now want to eat. Dishes that have a real name - just like other cuisines.
As for cooking at home, I will follow recipes and use individual spices. Madhur Jaffrey’s Ultimate Curry Bible is my go-to cookbook. It not only covers dishes from sub-continent but also has recipes from the curry “diaspora”. That said, I do tend to use her “Curry Easy” book more often, simply because it’s , erm, easier. Even easier, I always have a jar or two of Patak’s spice pastes - say, the Tikka Marinade, to stir into yoghurt as a marinade for chicken.
I don’t know where Dave expected the direction of travel of this thread but let’s be clear, “curry” is not a South Asian term. It’s an Anglicised version of the Tamil word, kari, meaning sauce. So, let’s exclude the vast chunk of South Asian dishes which are not reliant on a lot of sauce/gravy, as they are not curries in the West. But the curry, in its wet form, has been around for a long time in the English speaking world. It first appears in print form in 1747 in Hannah Glasse’s cook book published that year.
