What is a Bradford curry?

It starts with a throwaway response to Niamh (Eat Like A Girl) who asked her Twitter followers about their favourite curry - Indian, Malay, Thai and so forth. Like a shot I was there - "Bradford curry, natch". At which point it got a little more difficult because Niamh asked the tricky question about whether there is something uniquely Bradford about a Bradford curry. Hence this little blog post.

Like everywhere else with decent curry in England, Bradford's curry comes originally from the cafes and restaurants that set up to serve the Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Indian diaspora working in mills and factories, driving buses and cleaning toilets. Bradford's oldest curry houses - Karachi, Kashmir, Sweet Centre - have been around for over 60 years serving much the same food now as they did back then. The Bradford curry was probably born in these places - not just the odd habit of serving a plate of chips with the rogan josh or saag ghost but changes in ingredients and the currying of almost everything (although this results in the keema and chips with cheese that they serve at the fab MyLahore) but a slightly different type of curry from that you'll get elsewhere.

Most of Britain's curry is cooked by Bangladeshi chefs in restaurants owned by Bengali immigrants and their descendants. Bradford isn't alone in being different here (although we've some decent Bengali-owned restaurants like Moghul's in Keighley) but it's important to note that Bradford's 'Asian' population is overwhelmingly from a small part of Azad Kahsmir near to the city of Mirpur. The Bradford curry is a wedding of the tastes of these immigrants with the ingredients they could get in a Yorkshire mill city.

I had a beer with a leading Bradford chef (well I had a beer, he didn't), Omar Khan founder of OK's (or Omar Khan's restaurant) on Little Horton Lane opposite the ice rink. Omar was Wold Champion Curry Chef in 1995 with his take on that quintessentially British curry dish, chicken tikka masala. Omar was born in Pakistan but came to Bradford as a boy - he's a Bradfordian first and learned to cook here in the city. I asked him what made a Bradford curry different.

"The curries are all different. Those from Mirpur, Azad Kashmir are simple with only a couple of main ingredients. The Pathans have sweet, creamy curries. And further south the curries are hotter. The colder the climate the colder the curry!"

"But what about Bradford, " I ask, "What makes a Bradford curry?"

"Take my chicken tikka masala. Everywhere else puts cream in it..."

"Yoghurt?" I ask

"Sometimes that, yes. But I don't, that wouldn't be Kashmiri style. Keep it simple. About this much onion." Omar holds his thumb and forefinger about two or three inches apart - I guess a medium onion! He continues:

"Tomatoes. Two or three. Ripe. Garlic clove. Chili powder." (he doesn't say how much chili) "Turmeric."

I ask about spices.

"Put a whole clove or two in for more oomph. Cinnamon stick. Two or three peppercorns. You can grind these up if you want, but better whole."

"Jeera you need jeera. Just crushed."

I interrupt to enthuse. Jeera - cumin - is my favourite spice.

"Crushed in a pestle."

I'm not sure any of this qualifies as the recipe I promised Niamh. When Omar and I cooked this live on a stage at the World Markets Festival (really we did), we used fresh chicken rather than prepared with tikka sauce and the whole thing took about 20-30 minutes. We fed it to Gerry Sutcliffe, the then Labour MP for Bradford South and he's still living!

I guess the thing about the Bradford curry is simplicity. There aren't pages of ingredients just meat and vegetables cooked in spices and served with bread or rice. The classic Bradford curry is a child of Kashmiri home cooking - perhaps more meat and less vegetables than in Kashmir but still that sort of cooking. For me saag ghost - lamb and spinach - is the classic Bradford dish. And, like Omar's CTM, it's simple - no cream, no faffing about, just part-cooked lamb finished off with fresh ingredients and spices in a pan on the stove.

This might just be my take (helped by Omar). I guess I could talk to the other restaurateurs I know for some balance but I suspect defining the Bradford curry will always be a little elusive. It's partly the culture it grew up in - immigrants needing to eat after a shift, lads on a night out wanting to eat, young couples wanting a different but still cheap meal - and partly our memories of cheap formica tables, plastic chairs and no cutlery.

I'm sure other Bradford people will have their own views and experiences - favourites even and do share them - but in the end it's perhaps the shared experience of eating great, cheap food in unpretentious surroundings that defines the Bradford curry experience for most of us.


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Authenticity and the British curry house - the case for immigrant chefs

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I am, as you all know, not particularly bothered by migration. If I wish to be free to travel where ever, I guess I should allow that same freedom for others. So what follows isn't about the immigration but rather an attempt to get under the existential angst of the British curry house. It seems they might be dying out:

It's often been said that Tikka Masala is the British national dish.

But it might not be for much longer, as figures show two curry houses are closing in Britain each week due to a shortage of chefs.

This crisis is due in part to the retirement of the original wave of immigrants in the 1970s who set up curry houses.

The problem is that the children of South Asian immigrants - perhaps especially the children of those running the takeaways and curry restaurants - really have little interest in working very long hours serving cheap curries to often ungrateful (indeed regularly drunk) customers. They've watched as the older generation worked itself into an early grave, putting up with racism, ignorance and aggression so as to make a half decent living.

The same story went for the traditional (if that's the right word) Chinese takeaway - every town had one but the sons and daughters of the Hong Kong immigrants were just as uninterested in working a 60 hours week of late nights as the sons and daughters of Bangladeshi or Pakistani curry house proprietors. The way in which the business - along with a new generation of Chinese food sellers - has been sustained has been through immigration.

And this is precisely how the Bangladesh Caterers Association frame the problem - they can't recruit people to train here in the UK so need to go to Bangladesh to find the chefs needed to keep the restaurants and takeaways going. All this is happening in a fast food and restaurant market that is changing rapidly - not just with the success of new franchise chains like Nandos but with a new bunch of immigrants from the middle east, from Poland, from Africa and from Southern Europe. Where curry and Chinese had the world to themselves they now compete with Kurds running cafes, polish takeaways and Moroccan/Spanish fusion. Add in Vietnamese, Korean and Greek and there's a real pressure on those existing takeaways and curry houses.

Regardless of the immigration question (and I'd let the chefs in), it strikes me that relying on a stream of new chefs from the other side of the world isn't the most sustainable business model - the Bangladesh Caterers Association might be right about the difficulties in recruiting and training curry chefs here in the UK but this could say more about the job and the conditions than it does about the supply of potential chefs. Indeed, while I'm sure that the mainstream catering business has a good number of immigrant chefs, it's still the case that plenty of British-born people enter into the cheffing business. A business model based on selling cheap takeaway food will struggle where there's upward pressure on wages.

The truth is that, given the proliferation of other takeaways and cheap restaurants (not to mention the street food explosion), there perhaps needs to be a shakeout in the curry house business. The best probably have little to worry about but if a third of the UK's 12,000 or so curry houses closed would it really be a cultural disaster? I can't speak for anywhere other than Bradford but my observation is that, while the 'curry after a night on the lash' market is still there it's far less important than a more regular market including an important market for family dining. And this changes the sort of restaurants - we're less keen on tatty flock wallpaper and cheap photos of the Taj Mahal preferring places that meet the clean, sharp and smart image of other restaurants. But one thing we still demand is authenticity.

Staffing has always been a dilemma for restaurants offering culturally-specific cuisine. It's not that only a Bangladeshi can cook a biryani but that the customer is looking for authenticity - eating a curry cooked by a Polish woman and served by a Latvian waiter feels wrong even if the food is great. And this means that, if we want our rogan josh served by a slightly surly young Asian and our pasta carbonara from a tight-trousered Italian holding an outsized pepper pot, we have a allow people to come to Britain to meet this need (given we know that there aren't enough British-born Asians or Italians to satisfy our demand for authenticity).

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Is there really a curry crisis?

All right, it's in Keighley!

This is Bradford, Britain’s undisputed curry capital and home to a bewildering range of restaurants serving Asian food. From Prasad’s exceptional vegetarian food through a range of decent quality mid-market curry houses to the classic providers of the mucky curry – the Sweet Centre on Lumb Lane, the Kashmir, the Karachi and the International all within a spit of each other and close to the University for that critical student market.

Yet some people suggest that the business is struggling:

Analyst Peter Backman, of Horizons FS, says that while the restaurant industry has just stopped growing, the Indian restaurant sector is doing even worse, with profits falling. Pat Chapman, founder of the Curry Club, and author of the Good Curry Guide, notes, "You just instinctively know they are struggling", while Backman adds that he is "increasingly gloomy" about the sector's outlook for the next few years, believing Indian restaurants will "continue to lose share to the rest of the eating out market" if the recession continues.

I’m going to take these guys at their word – after all they’re the experts in these matters. The problems, we’re told, are three-fold:

• The Indian restaurant business hasn’t innovated – everywhere we go there’s the same menu, a seemingly endless list of variations on rogan josh, CTM and balti this and that.
• The children of the industry don’t want to work there preferring other jobs with shorter hours and earlier nights
• The government’s immigration policies mean that the tradition of importing chefs from the sub-continent has broken down and there simply aren’t the chefs to fill the hole

It seems to me that there’s another part of the restaurant business that might provide a lesson for the curry house – the Italian. Just as you’re hard pushed to find a High street without an Indian, every place has its share of Italian restaurants. And these restaurants, on the whole, target exactly the same mid-market customers as do the curry houses. Moreover, the Italian developed a consistent offer (usually presented on a menu slightly bigger than a broadsheet newspaper) with a set of familiar dishes that crop up time and time again.

The secret wasn’t exceptional food but consistency, reliability, friendliness and value. And the good ones thrived and survived. Even in a place like Bradford where the curry house is king there are plenty of Italian restaurants. I don’t doubt that, in these tough times, these restaurants are struggling and that some may go to the wall.

For Bradford – curry central (although unlike most other places Bradford’s curry restaurants are mostly Kashmiri-run rather than Bengali-run) means even more of a challenge for restaurants. And the cannier restaurateurs have stopped trying to cram another sleekly-designed place onto Leeds Road. Instead they look to nearby towns – Omar Khan has opened a new restaurant in Skipton and Shipley’s Aagrah has places at Pudsey, on the A64 near York and at Thornbury.

As to innovation there is some – Jaldi Jaldi, Mumtaz’s fast food chain is interesting and creative, for example – but not in the menu. We are stuck with a false search for authenticity:

Ranjit Mathrani, the chief executive of Masala World, which employs 5,000 people and, among others, owns London's Veerasawamy, the country's oldest surviving Indian restaurant, claims the chef shortage has brought the group's expansion up short as surely as the recession.

The company, he points out, could not use "curry college" chefs, because they only allow chefs to cook dishes from their home regions, he says, so they can offer their customers authentic Indian food.

The proper answer to Ranjit’s problem is to remind him that the curry we eat in Britain is the result of an evolution in the dishes brought here from South Asia. What we need is for some more adventurous chefs and a willingness to cut the classic Asian menu down from its choice of fifty or sixty different main courses.

Perhaps a new generation of home grown chefs – needed because we can’t import them from Mirpur or Sylhet any more – will begin to change the menus again. Or maybe the best Asian family restaurants will take the Italian route and eschew innovation in favour of getting the basics right. And, in the end, success will come to the places that set out an offer people like at a price they can afford with service that makes you feel at home.

There isn't a crisis but a little home grown creativity might not go amiss!

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Hot stuff....

I don't know about you but I'm quite an enthusiast for curry. Not the "let's drink seventeen pints of lager and then eat a vindaloo (before throwing up)" kind of curry enthusiast but a more subtle maven. But until I arrived in the spiritual home of great curry (sorry Brummies but that's Bradford) I didn't appreciate just what it was really about.

Bunging into the dish a pile of chilli till it becomes so hot the sweat pours from you. That's not the point - yes, we like it hot. We like that sharp chilli hit. But we also like the dryness of black pepper, the strange sweet aftertaste of cloves, the wonderful smell of jeera and the bitterness of coriander. All wrapped around garlic, tomatoes and citrus flavours.

If you're lucky there'll be other little flavours sneaking in there - an acrid sniff of fenugreek, aromatic cardamon - green and brown - and the wonderful acidic hit of wild onion seeds. Plus that glorious saffron flavour - or for those preferring Kashmiri tang, replace that with turmeric.

So my dear friends, it isn't a game of who can eat the hottest curry. That chilli hit masks a complexity of flavour, a subtlety of taste that you're missing by chasing the machismo of spiciness. A little less chilli, a little less hot and you'll find a revelation - a cornucopia of hot, sharp, sweet, acrid and acidic flavours to set against the taste of the meat, the greens and the beans.

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Mutton curry - an authentic South London recipe!

Ok, it’s my recipe and I’m from South London. That’s authentic!

Mutton curry is, without doubt, one of the finest dishes on the planet. Whether we’re talking Caribbean, Kashmiri or indeed Penge.

The secret for me is in the time you take to make the curry rather than the precise contents. And it takes a long time – nearly as long as it take to make a good oxtail stew!

You start – as one does – with a couple of pounds of mutton on the bone (I get it hacked up by the halal butcher), some onions and some garlic. And mix them all together with enough curry power, salt, ground ginger and cumin to coat all the mutton – add some oil so it all stays stuck and marinades well. I sometimes add a dash or three of vinegar (if I remember).

Leave to stand for absolutely ages – at least 24 hours and ideally 48 hours in the fridge marinading. The mutton should look almost cooked at this point (it isn’t it just looks that way). Heat up some oil in a heavy pan or casserole and seal the meat – add some other vegetables such as celery, okra or turnip and cover with water. Bring to the boil and then put into the over – preheated to somewhere between 100 and 150 degrees. Cook for at least 4 hours – the bones should come off the meat cleanly.

Serve with plain boiled rice (or naan or chapatti – whatever takes your fancy) and a pint of lager.

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Friday Fungus: Well it's splendid, I'm not sure what it is and you probably can't eat it!

This quite spectacular polypore of some sort has sprung up on Graham's stump. Any help from you lot out their identifying it would be welcome.

Now - it being Friday - I shall focus on the consumption of beer, curry, beer, more beer and maybe a glass or two of something shorter. After all alcohol consumption is falling - someone has to do something about it!

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