Curry Powder

My mother cooked simple, straightforward, nourishing food. She didn't particularly like cooking, but she faithfully insured that we had meat/fish, veggies, and a starch at most evening meals. I believe that in the early days of her marriage, she studied her Good Housekeeping cookbook religiously. We certainly benefited from her care and her ability to provide variety in our food over the years. Thanks to her studies of that cookbook, we learned to love spare ribs, liver, and all kinds of seafood. Slices of her meatloaf appeared as a staple in my early school lunch sandwiches. I still hold her potato salad as the exemplar of all potato salads, and I despair of ever making gravy as expertly as she did. (How did she learn to make such a perfect roux so effortlessly?? And without knowing what in the world a roux was?) She and her oldest sister, Willie, seem to have intuited the same spaghetti sauce recipe, which I discovered decades after I had married, moved to the Midwest, and had dinner at my aunt's house in Michigan. Mother's vegetable soup will always remain in my family's 'food memory' as another delicious classic. She could also stir up a batch of biscuits in the blink of an eye and never needed to follow a recipe. (I asked her to make biscuits a couple of years before she died, just one more time, but she said she'd forgotten how. Alas.) For someone who regarded cooking as more chore than creative pleasure, Mother was a pretty good cook.

But she never cooked anything with curry powder.

I'm thinking of Mother's cooking today for two reasons. One because last night, while my husband (who doesn't like this meal) was in Chicago, I fixed a lovely batch of liver and onions just for myself. Total indulgence for less than $3.00. It reminded me of so many meals at home. The second reason is that today I am making a crockpot recipe for curried chicken, which has made my house smell mouth-wateringly scrumptious. These aromas never appeared in my mother's kitchen.

Nothing really spicy ever did appear in our kitchen. I remember introducing various seasonings after I had married and would visit my parents and cook for them, but I don't recall my mother ever following recipes that required more than salt, pepper, ham or bacon for greens, and mustard. (Now that I think of it, there must have been a little extra zip in the sauce for those spare ribs so long ago.)

My gastronomic experiences in college truly flung open the door to the delights of different foods, and, though you may not believe it, spending a year in Scotland broadened my food horizon even farther. I lived in a residence hall at the University of St. Andrews, and we all ate together in the dining room every day. I loved cauliflower and cheese. I had never eaten cauliflower at all, so this was a new veggie. I loved 'tatties and neaps', AKA potatoes and turnips. While I had eaten turnip greens quite often, I had never actually had turnips. I had never eaten lamb. My fellow residents, all from the UK, groaned at what they considered pedestrian fare, but I gobbled it up. Who knew that you could put cold peas in a green salad? I mean, really. At breakfast I could eat blood pudding and scrambled eggs and porridge. I even love haggis. (True.)

I first discovered curries in that dining hall. Not adventurous, super spicy, eye-wateringly hot curries, but curries nonetheless, matching up ingredients that I had never imagined. Wow. I looked forward to the meals that featured curry. So exotic to someone raised in southeastern Virginia and so very delicious. (I visited London on several occasions and we ate Indian food several times there, too.)

Of course, when I returned home, I wanted all my favorite homey foods and put curries out of my mind for awhile. I then spent a year working at Harvard's Center for the Study of World Religions, and was delighted to meet several scholars and their families from India. They plied me with an even broader array of wonderful food. When we moved to Chicago, I lived near the area heavily populated by folks from South Asia. Curries again! And I began to use curry powder in my own cooking. My culminating experience occurred in the summer of 2001, when I actually spent six weeks in India, enjoying just about every new dish I ate.

I never tried to introduce either of my parents to curries. I never sneaked curry powder into any dish just to see 'how they liked it'. I'm not sure my mother had ever even heard of curry, as a matter of fact. But she is responsible for the breadth of my culinary tastes.

Mother's cooking demonstrated how delicious good, plain, wholesome food could be, and that formed the foundation of my own cooking skills. More importantly, Mother's determination not only to send me to college but also to send me off to Europe for a year, to open windows to a world that she knew would enrich me, provided me with experiences and adventures that shape who I am to this very day.

That means Mother introduced me to curry powder after all.