Homemade curries in the 70s.

[Johnnyxgen]

Hi. I am trying to recreate the curry my mum made in the 70s for my now old and daft m&d.. I'm struggling with what she served as accompaniment..
So far I've got. Crisps. Sliced banana with dessicated coconut, major grey mango chutney and sliced tomato&onion and sliced cucumber. Did you put vinegar on the cucumber? Was raita even heard of in 70s Britain? Have I missed anything. Any help gratefully achieved. Jc.

Lots of cultures and countries use fruit in savoury food, including British. Apples with pork, cherries or oranges with duck, there are many more. Bananas are used in curries in India and Thailand and Sri Lanka. In Kashmir you get curry dishes with pineapple and mango.

None of this is actually weird.

I'm so jealous! My horribly racist parents wouldn't allow things like curry, so I never even tried it until I left home, late 90s!

This thread has made me conjure up the awful stink of the homepride tins. It would linger for days. The pan couldn't be left to soak or would smell forever. Ugh.

I think it was often to do with people who had lived in the Colonies trying to recreate foods they had loved. My father worked and lived in Africa for years. He ate curry a lot then.

I grew up in Zimbabwe in the 70's , that where my Irish mum learned to make this curry.

Definitely sultanas, which made it much too sweet, not to mention the banana and desiccated coconut!

Me too. Started last night so easy to catch up. Such a lovely family xxx

@LaMarschallin

@Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g

Brilliant! Thank you

Love that book. I've made some of the recipes out of it but can't at the moment because my copy's gone AWOL.
Still, you can't go wrong with a ham roll.

Excellent name, btw. Hope the Licky End clears up soon...

Not forgetting Heinz Curried Beans. Baked beans in curry sauce with sultanas.

Can we mention curried eggs, hard boiled eggs plopped in a yellow sauce.

I make an 80s curry from time to time, just how my mum made it.

Recipe:
Sweat onion,
Add chopped apple and sultanas (juicier than raisins)
Sharwood's curry powder
Chopped fresh tomatoes
Chicken stock + water
Cornflour to thicken
Plenty of salt.
Add diced chicken to broth

Very very low calorie too which is good if you're dieting.

My aunt married an Indian (from India, he went to the UK to study medicine, married my aunt and never left). He taught my Mum to cook Indian food from scratch with individual spices, the 'curries' that I had occasionally at other people's houses were a bit of a shock.

When I moved in with my now DH I was surprised that I was a much better cook of Indian food than he was, considering he's Malaysian of entirely Indian descent. Then I visited his family after we got married and it turned out his Mum makes curries with a couple of teaspoons of curry powder from a tin, no sultanas but otherwise very similar to a 70s UK curry. DH is a very good Cantonese cook as his DM worked full time with weird shifts and he was mostly raised by a Nonya housekeeper (we used to go and visit her when we went to Malaysia until she died).

80s for me. A tin of Homepride curry sauce which had dioramas in it and was an indescribable yellow colour.

Bloody autocorrect sultanas.

My DFs curry was mince, rasins, baked beans and curry powder cooked to within an inch of its life. We had bread and butter as a side dish.

My dad's mate served one with rice pudding - he knew it went with rice but thought that rice pudding WAS rice.

I went to dig out my Nanny Ogg's cookbook but found Gasp0de had beaten me to it. My mum never made curries as it would have been far too "foreign" but, if she had, she might have used this gem of a recipe from my Nan's old A Picture Treasury of Good Cooking (1953). It was a gift to her from the American servicemen who stayed with them during the war and featured foods unheard of when it arrived during the last days of rationing.

This is appetising too.

Ack, @HarrietSchulenberg that note about coconut milk!!