Cooking Indian Food at Home - Where to Start?

If you read my article, Curry, you'll know that my first experiences of the dish were of the generic variety which the British invariably cooked and ate when living abroad a few
decades ago. You'll also know that I then discovered "real" Indian cookery and
decided that as I couldn't afford to eat out that much, I needed to learn how
to cook the stuff myself.

My first stop then, was a local bookshop, where the choice of books on Indian
cookery was somewhat limited. However, I struck lucky and discovered a book
called Indian Cookery by Madhur Jaffrey - what a find. Written in simple
language but with lovely descriptive text and recommendations on what to serve
with what, it was just what I had been looking for.

There was a stumbling block, however, which was the endless list of spices,
seasonings and flavourings in the front of the book. I didn't know where to
start - I'd heard of quite a lot of them, having watched a few TV programmes on
Indian cooking but, "help" I thought, "buying that many all at once is going
to cost a fortune". If you're thinking the same, don't panic. Check in your
store cupboard. You probably already have some of the items you will need.
For example, look for black peppercorns, bay leaves, chilli powder (if you're
already a fan of chilli con carne), ground ginger, nutmeg, cloves and cinnamon
if you bake cakes or apple pies. Maybe you'll find mustard seeds if you do
your own pickling and sesame seeds if you make rolls or cook Chinese food.
That only leaves a few basic ingredients which appear in a lot of Indian
recipes - cumin, coriander, turmeric and cardamom. Often you need ground cumin
and coriander but if you buy the whole spices, you can grind them as necessary
(and they keep longer that way too).<


The other thing I did was to choose a fairly simple recipe to start with and I
just bought the spices I needed for that. The next time I want to cook an
Indian meal, I chose another recipe with similar ingredients so I had to just
buy a couple more things. Soon enough I built up a whole store cupboard of the
things I needed and it didn't have had such a drastic effect on my wallet.

Then there was no stopping me - I even know some recipes by heart now and you
can do the same if you want to.

You don't need special equipment for Indian cookery, although I wouldn't be
without my electric coffee grinder (to grind spices) and it's nice (but not
necessary) to have the traditional dishes to serve your meal in. Other than
that, you need a bit of patience and it's fun to cook with a friend so that you
can share the chopping and grinding or have someone read the recipe out to you
step by step so you don't go wrong in the middle.

The flavours are great, a curry evening is really sociable, so go on, give it a
try.