TL:DR – A delicious but inexpensive recipe for pilchard curry.
When Mrs Sciencebase was a student, she used to make an inexpensive curry: tin of pilchards, tin of tomatoes, chopped onion, crushed clove of garlic, teaspoon each of cumin, coriander, and turmeric powder, salt & pepper, and a half a teaspoon of chili powder. Served on a bed of whole-grain boiled rice.
It sounded a bit grim, but wasn’t too bad. (Brown-bread icecream for pudding or Granny Grape Pudding). It was all certainly a whole lot more adventurous than the boiled noodles and soy sauce I once cooked her because I had nothing else in the cupboard. Don’t know if it compares well with a camping meal we once had together, which amounted to half each of a raw calabrese head, half a bag of Bombay Mix, and half a bottle of red wine. Oh, how the other half live, I hear you exclaim.
Anyway, back to that “curry”. The powder mix works well with other main protein ingredients, but at some point, having taken on the mantle of chief-curry-cook in our house, I wanted to stretch out the recipe a little further. I began adding various other spices, crushed cardamom seeds, cinnamon, grated fresh ginger, cloves, and mustard powder. Over the years, the list grew and grew. At some point, I used to make up a jar of the mix that would last several weeks and it usually contained well over 40 different ingredients. Ludicrous. I think at one point I was even adding garam masala as well as frying and crushing whole seeds of coriander and cumin. The curries I produced always tasted pretty good. I think…
Time went by, we got busier, there was little time for such lengthy curry powder recipes, we didn’t always have all the ingredients I needed, I simplified the blend. It wasn’t quite the three-chord-trick that Mrs Sciencebase came up with for her pilchard curry, but it was a shadow of its former self, perhaps half a dozen ingredients rather than a couple of score. It always seemed to taste about the same as the more complex blend.
Then one day, around the time covid started, we were on very limited shopping opportunities and Mrs Sciencebase simplified the shopping list to the minimum…and a tub of mild madras curry powder was purchased. It contained maybe half a dozen different ingredients, the ones from the student pilchard curry recipe and a couple of others. The new curries I made with this pre-mixed powder didn’t seem to lack anything, in fact, they were pretty much the same to taste as the original pilchard and anything that I put together with four different spices in the pot. So, we’ve stuck with that. It doesn’t feel quite as Zen to use a pre-mixed powder, so I do often add some extra chili powder and grated coconut, occasionally some lime juice. One thing I don’t ever use these days…and maybe only ever did once, are tinned pilchards.