"Thinking back", as we older members of CR0 tend to do, to the good old days of the late 60's and early 70's, when curries were as distinctive and individual as the chefs who created them, I suddenly remembered something else about those times -- chicken curries came, /by default/, on the bone and leg; if you wanted off the bone or breast, you paid more (double, sometimes, if you wanted both). And suddenly I realised that therein may lay the key to these long-lost but never-forgotten flavours -- curries were not "hot-assembled" dishes, as Ken Lo would have put it, adding pre-cooked chicken to an already assembled sauce, but were instead almost certainly cooked from scratch, with (quite possibly) a whole bird being cooked in the sauce from scratch, or at the very least, four quarters being cooked while the meat remained on the bone. So now I am inclined to try that for myself -- not a whole bird, obviously, since that could lead to considerable waste, but perhaps a half-chicken, cooked from scratch as an integral part of the curry. I shall be interested to see what effect, if any, it has on the flavour of the final dish.
And on that note, I bid you a "Very Merry Christmas, one and all", as Tiny Tim would have said, and "see you in the New Year". [1]
** Phil.
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[1] D.v. and Insha'Allah.
Topic: "Thinking back ..." ( 5,290 )
