Lamb curry

It is amazing how evocative food can be. Today my mind is off to La Rochelle in France once more.

First I'll tell you the meal that's plopping away at the moment is a Bhoona Gosht, a lamb curry. The last time I remember cooking this recipe was in France when we were staying with our French friends. Their son had been to stay with us a year or so before. While he was here we took him along to our local Indian restaurant & he discovered curries, a new experience for him. So when we visited them next in France, he was keen for us to make a proper curry. He hadn't been able to find anything like it in France. So I agreed to do this lamb curry.

While the son located some spices, Marie, his mother, our friend, took me along to the butcher.It was just a small suburban establishment on the outskirts of La Rochelle. There we utterly bemused the butcher. Not only was I very definitely English, a rarity in those parts, but I was clearly a friend of a Frenchwoman - the French seem to regard this as an impossible concept. He was even more amazed when he realised that I, the Englishwoman (& therefore obviously a hopeless cook as no English person knows how to cook), was going to cook for Marie (a professional chef, which he knew) & her family &, what was more, I was cooking an Indian curry!!! This was internationalism gone mad for him. Still we managed to get the meat.

So back we went & set about making the curry. Marie watched eagerly, always keen to learn new culinary techniques. She was impressed by the Fox's knife skills as he diced up the onions. She was quite content as we sweated off the onions & garlic, but then came the spices. As I was cooking for 6 people in went 9 teaspoons of curry powder plus a teaspoon of chilli powder to give it a bit of extra oomph. Marie's eyes grew bigger & bigger, her mouth dropped further & further open, as I counted out the spoonfuls of spice. In France we discovered their idea of a curry for four people involves a quarter of a teaspoon of curry powder at most.She wasn't much reassured when she saw no liquid going in the pot except a tablespoon of vinegar & one of tomato puree. Nonetheless she let us get on with it & prayed the meal at the end would be edible.

After it had all plopped along we sat down for the meal. By then plenty of juices had come out of the meat to give a rich sauce. Nervously Marie took her first mouthful, expecting her mouth to burst into flames. She was somewhat surprised to discover it was really rather good. Her husband is a lot more conservative in his likes. He tried it, said it was good, but clearly found it overwhelming. The son & his girlfriend loved it.

So here we are again, once more with a bhoona gosht. And our memories return once more to that day in France & our friends - good times