Curry Cuisine: Fragrant Dishes from India, Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia. / Dorling Kindersley, 2006.
Corinne Trang, author of cookbooks on Vietnamese cuisine, along with 8 superlative cooks developed the recipes for this book focused on curries, from highly spiced and truly delightful cuisines of mostly Asian cultures. Their dishes are imbued with spices and saturated with sauces that give special extravagance to food made with simple instructions. Most of the dishes are meat or seafood-based. Yet there are a number of vegetarian ones, and breads, pastes, and pickles jibe for your attention among the recipes organized by country or area.
Each section features the ingredients most representative of the region’s style of curry and these are photographically detailed, so that you could match your shopping list to the actual item in a store. What’s nice about the photographic compositions is you get a view of each region’s particular taste. Looking at North India, its curry ingredients are seeds, leaves, chilis, ginger, garlic and mustard oil in addition to lentils which are considered part of the “taste” of that region. Comparing these with South India, their taste topnote is fresh coconut, followed by fresh chilis, cashew nuts, fresh ginger, fresh limes, tamarind, and some of the same seeds as North India.
For New Year’s you could follow the recipe for Vegetable and Tofu Curry from Vietnam, which gets its golden color from annatto seed extract, or Cambodian Red Curry paste in coconut milk with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, and fruit in a veganized recipe for Chicken curry. In a veganized recipe, the meat or eggs, etc. are left out, while a substitute ingredient takes their place, all to delicious effect.
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