With a huge variety of styles ranging from delicately spiced to hot and fiery, and from mild and creamy to fragrant and aromatic, it is perhaps no surprise that the curry is one of our nation's most popular dishes. Yet despite this, the art of making curries seems to be cloaked in an aura of mystery, with many of us preferring to buy takeaway or ready-made versions rather than attempting to make our own at home.

Curry Bible aims to show just how simple it can be to create a range of tempting curry dishes from scratch using a combination of freshly ground spices and aromatic herbs. The carefully selected recipes bring together the familiar and the more exotic, and comprise dishes from across India and Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Malaysia,Indonesia, Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.

Curry is a firm favourite in almost every corner of the globe. Variations of this delicious spicy cuisine can be traced back to the dawn of civilization, and the wonderful colours, textures and flavours produced by the spices used in the preparation of curry have ensured its enduring popularity throughout the world. Spices had been used extensively in the kitchens of the wealthy in England since the late Middle Ages, both to preserve food and to disguise the flavour of ingredients that were past their best. With the opening up of the spice routes in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries spices became less expensive and more readily available and began to be incorporated in everyday cooking. Meanwhile, the use of spices as flavourings had become something of a fine art in India and South-East Asia, regions that were extensively colonized by Western powers.

The cuisines of India, Cambodia, Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and Vietnam were adapted tothe palates of the foreign occupiers and were subsequently brought 'home'. When the British Raj in India came to an end in 1947, returning army personnel and civil servants brought their favourite recipes with them and curry became firmly established in Britain, becoming so popular in subsequent decades that it was recently voted the top British national dish. But what exactly is a 'curry'? There are almost as many explanations of the meaning of the word as there are different types of curry: however, the consensus is that it is a dish of meat, poultry,fish or vegetables cooked in one of many variants of spicy sauce, although the type of curry and the spices used varies from reg on to region and fromcountry to country.

Introduction

Cooking with Spices

Essential Curry Ingredients

Essential Recipes

Chapter 1 - Poultry

Chapter 2 - Meat

Chapter 3 - Fish & Seafood

Chapter 4 - Vegetables & Pulses

Chapter 5 - Sides & Accompaniments

Index

Conversion Charts