One Saturday morning last month I got a surprise package from Amazon. It was a pretty weighty package. As I hadn’t ordered anything it was with interest and then delight that I opened it to find a lovely fabric-bound hardback edition of The Complete Asian Cookbook by Charmaine Solomon. As I picked out, a small slip of paper fluttered to the ground. On it, a message from from Meemalee. So thanks Meemalee, this one’s for you!
After the pungent fishiness of last week, this is at the other end of scale entirely. Rich, thick and luscious, it’s a Thai curry that proudly trumpets its Indian influence. I think this is a southern style dish and is particularly aromatic, rounded and – compared to the scud-laced fire pits of many Thai curry pastes – gentle. That’s not to say there ain’t any chilli, this is from Thailand after all. But the heat is warming rather than searing.
This, my friends, is a curry for the brave. And I’m not talking about the heat common to most, if not all, Thai curries. This one is an eye-wateringly intense blitzkrieg of pungency built on a slow building furnace of chilli-fuelled embers.
You have been warned. And if you’re still with me and fancy a bit of a challenge to your taste buds, then the sour, hot, ever-so-slightly sweet and concentrated fishiness is something entirely different. At least for me.
Jokes about ’mystery meat’ ready meals are proving to be rather more prescient than we might might be entirely comfortable with. It seems we’ve been suffering from a spate of horse meat lasagnes, spaghetti sauces and other processed meat products. And for who knows how long? Certainly everything points to an entrenched trade in illegal meat.
Putting aside the desirability of eating horse, the rather more worrying (for me) aspects of mislabelling, what really strikes me is how this shows the degree to which people in the UK – and possibly elsewhere in Europe – seem to have lost touch with the food they eat.