When I first started cooking curries in my early twenties I used to just use cumin, turmeric, coriander and a bit of chilli powder, and then added salt and pepper to personal taste. Pretty much didn’t matter what meat or veg were in the pot – chicken, pork, prawns, pilchards, courgettes, mushrooms, sweet peppers, that was the mix, a nice simple blend 1:1:1:1/4…
But, we got bored with that after a while, so I began to expand my little recipe a little, adding some mustard, cardamom, cloves, mace, cinnamon, ginger…the list went on and on…whatever spice came to hand, mixed herbs, Chinese 5-spice etc etc. At one time, I reckon I had 32 different spices in my curry mix, my “Curry Power” as a grandiosely referred to it, maybe more if you count some of the extras in the likes of garam masala, which I threw into the pot. It was overpowering in many ways and I reckon the subtleties of many of the flavours were lost in the great wall of spice all finished off with coconut milk and maybe crushed almonds. It was the culinary equivalent of the Phil Spector wall of sound. It was tasty, but it had its day…
As I’ve got older and more to the point when the spice shop shut its shutters for the last time, I’ve stripped my curry powder recipe back somewhat, it’s not quite the simple 1:1:1:1/4, there might still be a dash of mustard or a handful of crushed cardomom pods, there’s always garlic and there’s still coconut, in there but it now depends on my mood, and more to the point what the main ingredients are. It’s simpler, more subtle, tastier…I hope…
Having overdone a few of my earlier musical recordings and ended up with a swamp of sound rather than a wall, my mixes, which you can find on BandCamp, SoundCloud, iTunes etc are also hopefully a lot subtler, tastier. They’re rarely just a 1:1 as singer-songwriters often call the standard vocal + guitar songs, there’s usually percussion, a bass guitar and more often than not a guitar solo on a second guitar, but I don’t think I’ve got close to filling 32-tracks in my recording software recently. Spice up your life, have a listen.