Topic: Pat Chapman - Why so much hostility?

[beachbum]

I just ordered his "Balti" book from The Book Depository, so let's see how that goes.
 
On the subject of fats, I was briefly on a Paleolithic diet (what you can kill, pick off a tree, dig out of the ground with a sharp stick or gather from a nest preferably after climbing up a 500m cliff face)  ;D - one of the interesting things I learned was the industrial conspiracy behind the "saturated fats and butter are bad, veg oils and marge are good" mantra.

This mob explain it far better than I could: http://www.drcranton.com/nutrition/oiling.htm
It's a long read but will raise your eyebrows. And very appropriate to this forum.

However it's true what they say, that 80 years ago, despite the fact that most people would live to 70 or 80 except they often got knocked off by infectious disease, coal mining accidents or several World Wars - growing up in the UK in the 1950s all my aunties and grannies lived to 95 but the men got culled out by the above fates.... I digress - heart attacks were very rare. But everyone lived on bread and dripping, breakfasts fried in lard and as much butter as they could afford. They also walked to work, did manual or hard factory work and didn't sit on their arses in front of an LCD for half the day, and a perfect weekend consisted of playing local soccer or climbing Pen-Y-Ghent with the Mrs and Kids. When I was a wee nipper I drank the little bottle of olive oil from the medicine cabinet and Mam rushed me off to the doctor ... 

I buy Indian ghee from a local Indian Grocer for ?6 a kilo tin, nice.  And it's from genuine holy cows

[Salvador Dhali]

I just ordered his "Balti" book from The Book Depository, so let's see how that goes.
 
On the subject of fats, I was briefly on a Paleolithic diet (what you can kill, pick off a tree, dig out of the ground with a sharp stick or gather from a nest preferably after climbing up a 500m cliff face)  ;D - one of the interesting things I learned was the industrial conspiracy behind the "saturated fats and butter are bad, veg oils and marge are good" mantra.

This mob explain it far better than I could: http://www.drcranton.com/nutrition/oiling.htm
It's a long read but will raise your eyebrows. And very appropriate to this forum.

However it's true what they say, that 80 years ago, despite the fact that most people would live to 70 or 80 except they often got knocked off by infectious disease, coal mining accidents or several World Wars - growing up in the UK in the 1950s all my aunties and grannies lived to 95 but the men got culled out by the above fates.... I digress - heart attacks were very rare. But everyone lived on bread and dripping, breakfasts fried in lard and as much butter as they could afford. They also walked to work, did manual or hard factory work and didn't sit on their arses in front of an LCD for half the day, and a perfect weekend consisted of playing local soccer or climbing Pen-Y-Ghent with the Mrs and Kids. When I was a wee nipper I drank the little bottle of olive oil from the medicine cabinet and Mam rushed me off to the doctor ... 

I buy Indian ghee from a local Indian Grocer for ?6 a kilo tin, nice.  And it's from genuine holy cows

The Balti book is probably one of his better ones, Beachbum, but (as with just about all recipes) you'll probably find you need to tweak it here and there to get the results you're after. (I'm sorry, Pat, but a miserly 8oz of onions and 6fl oz of water does NOT make a curry with enough sauce for four people - unless of course they're Lilliputian.)

And I can't agree more with what you say above about saturated fats and health (many thanks for the link, too. Most interesting). My grandparents had bloody hard lives living in Yorkshire bringing up my mum and dad during WW2, and I've listened to many a tale of how gran used to pack my dad's dripping sandwiches for school before leaving the house at 5am to walk 8 miles to do a 10-hour shift at t'mill. She smoked like a trooper, cooked everything in lard, survived breast cancer in her late 60s, and lived to 98.

But before I launch into the Python sketch ("Dripping sandwiches? Luxury! We couldn't afford dripping sandwiches. We had to lick road clean wi' tongue..."), it's the same story elsewhere.

In France, for example, the diet is heavy in saturated fats - duck fat, goose fat, butter, etc., yet they have a low incidence of heart disease.

Anyway, keeping loosely on topic, butter ghee has long been my cooking fat of choice, and will continue to be so for as long as the old ticker holds out!
 

 

[ELW]

Butter ghee tastes great but i've been avoiding it due to my human herd behaviour disorder flaring up now & again. I think a large part of the death stats are the lag from smoking, but one area of Glasgow recorded average life expectancy of 63, probably meaning people in their 30's & 40's were snuffin it due to their lifestyle.

I'd never used as much salt in my life until I saw the 'tv chef' battering handfuls into everthing they made 

Would the Pat Chapman stuff worth picking up even second hand in 2012? or is it old hat?

[Stephen Lindsay]

Pat, in my opinion, should be regarded as a curry cooking legend. How I came to know about him, I am not sure, but his books Indian Restaurant Cookery, Favourite Restaurant Curries and Pat Chapman's Curry Bible are in my opinion seminal texts that all self-respecting curry-holics should have read.  With the 1984 Indian Restaurant Curries, Pat, for the first time to my knowledge, articulated recipes that were aimed squarely at those with a passion for the kinds of meals served in your local curry house. There were lots of Indian cookery books around even then but this book seemed to be the first that attempted to capture "that restaurant flavour". It didn't do that though.

In addition, it was almost subliminal advertising for his curry club, because if you couldn't source the spices for a particular recipe in your local shops then you could buy a spice pack directly from the club. Along with membership of the club, this book was my first foray into curry cookery as I imagined it should be.

Reading the introduction now, over 25 years later, his description on what goes on behind the scenes in an Indian takeaway kitchen seems somewhat dated.  As I understand it Pat has travelled widely whilst researching his books but this book seems to lack experience of Indian restaurant kitchens in the UK that cook the dishes we love.  It makes reference to a "curry gravy" (base) but suggests they are made with powdered garlic and ginger rather than the real thing.  It provides recipes for a Pakistani Curry Gravy and a Savoury Curry Gravy but doesn't guide the reader if they are to be used in isolation or if they are part of an overall method.  One is left feeling that the book is part experience and part guesswork.  So although not quite fulfilling it's promise of leaving most Indian restaurants at the starting gate, this book is still, in my opinion, a landmark text because it is the first of its kind and it does contain some recipes which produce great meals, only they are not what goes on in an Indian restaurant.

Pat's next book, Favourite Restaurant Curries can be seen as a sequel to Indian Restaurant Curries in that it covered lots of similar dishes. It also attempted to articulate how a restaurant could offer dozens of recipes by starting off with a base gravy and merely adding different spices to individualise a dish.  The previous book had by and large, shown the reader how to cook one-off curries.  However Favourite Restaurant Curries was far from being a fully developed guide to cooking resaurant style curries. It only hinted at how this would work in practice and Pat's recipes were probably too complicated to give the reader real insight into how to truly clone the dishes of the average local takeaway.

Latterly Pat produced The Curry Bible, a book which targets the sixteen curries most common to the Indian restaurant menu along with sixteen "house favourites". This time he included one-off recipes alongside the restaurant style equivalent which brought the book another step closer to restaurant methods of cooking albeit still short of offering the reader a coherent system. However I still use Pat's recipe for Tandoori Masala in my Lamb or Chicken Tikka and his Curry Bible remains for me a splendid reference text.

[curryhell]

Have all three of the texts you mention and a couple of his others.  I agree with everything you've said.  Until the first book appeared, nothing at all was available about restaurant cooking.  I have a shelf full of books - all traditional.  No use at all for making restaurant dishes.  Judging from the time many members of this forum have been trying to replicate the style, at the time his books and Khris Dhillons broke new ground for many of us.  And now 26 years later there's no looking back.  But even to this day there still is no definitive text on how to create Indian Restaurant Curry at home.  Will we ever see it i wonder :

[Stephen Lindsay]

CH I've also a bucket load of traditional books and what I didn't realise at the time I bought them (i.e. 25-30 years ago) was that there was difference between home and restaurant cooking. Therefore I cooked some of the recipes and was disappointed that they didn't taste remotely like anything I'd eaten from a curry house. Yes PC and KD were pioneers. As for a definitive text I don't know - there's a few that have taken us much further, e.g. Bruce Edwards. More recently there have been really good posts on this forum - Panpot's Ashoka, Abudulmohed and more recently the Fleet 5. Maybe the next definitive text will come from someone who is a member of this forum?

[ELW]

CH I've also a bucket load of traditional books and what I didn't realise at the time I bought them (i.e. 25-30 years ago) was that there was difference between home and restaurant cooking. Therefore I cooked some of the recipes and was disappointed that they didn't taste remotely like anything I'd eaten from a curry house. Yes PC and KD were pioneers. As for a definitive text I don't know - there's a few that have taken us much further, e.g. Bruce Edwards. More recently there have been really good posts on this forum - Panpot's Ashoka, Abudulmohed and more recently the Fleet 5. Maybe the next definitive text will come from someone who is a member of this forum?

Julian from c2g has an opportunity to put this right, unless he completed the 1st part before the Zaal visit. I'm sure he does a bit of market research on here. I suppose the ebook format has it's plusses when needing a quick update. I still find it very odd why hardly anyone focused on cooking technique. The chances of success using the type of heat & frying we are accustomed to at home has a high rate of failure in creating the bir taste

Edit - thats a great run through of the Pat Chapman stuff, I went straight for the kd book as soon as I saw it.
Of note - "The Takeaway Secret "by Kenny McGovern  did instruct the reader to increase the heat at the stages we now know to be important, among a few others

[Stephen Lindsay]

I think the prospect of Julian producing his own curry book is really quite exciting.

[curryhell]

CH I've also a bucket load of traditional books and what I didn't realise at the time I bought them (i.e. 25-30 years ago) was that there was difference between home and restaurant cooking. Therefore I cooked some of the recipes and was disappointed that they didn't taste remotely like anything I'd eaten from a curry house.

Funny you should say that SL, that's the same as happened to me and i'm sure a few other members of the site too

Yes PC and KD were pioneers. As for a definitive text I don't know - there's a few that have taken us much further, e.g. Bruce Edwards. More recently there have been really good posts on this forum - Panpot's Ashoka, Abudulmohed and more recently the Fleet 5. Maybe the next definitive text will come from someone who is a member of this forum?
[/quote]
I couldn't agree more re. those mentioned who haven taken things forward and not forgetting CBM who also has produced a document on the subject.  Why shouldn't it be written by someone from this forum?  I'm looking forward to reading C2G's when it comes out.

[curryhell]

"The Takeaway Secret "by Kenny McGovern  did instruct the reader to increase the heat at the stages we now know to be important, among a few others
[/quote]
I missed this one totally ELW.  Is a good read and full of info we now know to be correct with methods until of late we chose to ignore??? :