FACTORALY - E33 CURRY

Episode Date: April 11, 2024

There's no such thing as a curry. Well, there is, but it's not called that. So when you go for a curry, there can't be any calories in it because it doesn't exist. And anyway, it's very good for your health. So, tuck into this lot below! And click the pics to find out more. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello! Hello Simon, how are you? I'm alright thank you Bruce, how are you? I'm fabulous as always. Marvellous, good to hear. And hello to all of you invisible people who we can't see or hear. Thank you for listening to us. Indeed. If you don't know what you're listening to, this is a weekly podcast called...

Factorily. And the premise of this is that Bruce and I are nerds. And proud of it. Absolutely. Proud nerds. We love fun facts. We love useless trivia. And we pick a topic each week that seems, on the face of it, quite mundane. And we pick at it. And we look inside and we delve and we find some interesting, fun, fascinating facts. And we present them to you lot, our listeners. That's right, we do. So what are we presenting this

week, Simon? This week, Bruce, we are presenting curry. Ladies and gentlemen, curry! Do you like curry? I do like curry. I do love it. Well, let's, hmm, okay, so, hmm, caveats. Curry is a weird word. Let's start off here and say, technically speaking, there is no such thing as a curry here and say technically speaking there is no such thing as a curry correct just like there is no such thing as a fish as a fish or a seagull or anything else all those things we think of things aren't things yes those but there is a carry isn't there ah talk about carry so carry carry fisher is No, we talked about fishing on another episode. Oh, yes, that's right. So, curry is a soup.

Aha. It's a Tamil soup. But people over here just call anything that tastes a bit sort of cumin-y and spicy and Yes. turmeric-y and all those other nice, lovely things that go into a curry, they call it a curry. Yes, exactly that. So this word, kari, or kari, depending on your persuasion, K-A-R-I, first appears in the 16th century.

It's a Tamil word, as you say, and it literally means a sauce. Oh, a sauce. Okay. Which then became a soup, which then became a stew, which then became various other things. Yes. But there is no identifiable single dish that you can look at and say that is a curry even though you would go to a restaurant and you would order a vegetable curry or whatever it might be yeah curry does not exist in that sense it doesn't exist the

curry house does not exist either we've just opened up a can of curried worms here, haven't we? What does exist in the use of the word is the curry tree. OK. Of course, you get leaves, don't you? Right. There you go. So you get curry powder. Lots of Indian food has curry powder in it. Curry powder is made from dried, ground up curry leaves leaves curry leaves come from the curry plant which is indigenous to india okay so it's coincidental that the word kari meaning sauce and the tree curry which has the leaves in the food just happen to sound similar but right it's it's just a coincidence and uh you can also use the um the fruit of the curry tree oh the curry the curry tree produces small shiny black wait for it droops hey which loyal listeners will recognize from our

episode on nuts um and you can pulp these things up and use that in the cooking as well cool so i'll ask the question again all right right, go on. Given that they don't exist, what is your favorite curry? My favorite variety of Indian food. I knew you were going to ask this, and I prepared myself for it, and I still haven't been able to come up with an answer. I love Indian food or Bangladeshi food or Pakistani food or any of that stuff, which all sort of sadly comes under the umbrella term of Indian food yes or curry yeah um I love so much of it I love a balti I love a

Rogan Josh I rather like a um biryani which probably doesn't cast as a curry because it's not sauce based except for the little dish of vegetable curry that you get on the side a bit like a tandoori I guess a lot like a tandoori, I guess. A lot like a tandoori. Yeah. I like them of average temperature. I'm not one of these people who goes seeking out really hot things. How about you?

Do you have a favourite? Well, you see, I do have a favourite curry because I don't like heat. I'm not wild about chilli stuff. Right. But I do like spices. And people sometimes equate spice with heat. Yes. And for me, I actually really like a lampisanda oh get in which is a very nice creamy gentle mild curry with some kind of really nice

bread by you know it's like a keema nan or something oh it's just very nice things yes okay do you know the problem with this podcast we we're voiceovers, okay? So we're very conscious of noises that come from our mouth. We call them mouth clicks. But I am salivating already. You don't like hot either? I can put up with it if it's the only option. I won't deliberately choose it. I don't like really either? I can put up with it if it's the only option. I won't deliberately choose it. I don't like really, really spicy stuff.

The stuff that makes you uncomfortable, I don't see the point in. So someone like Wilbur Scoville, for example, wouldn't have held any appeal to you. Wilbur Scoville. Remind me? Scoville is a scale. This chap called Wilbur Scoville invented a scale. Oh, the heat scale. The heat scale. Yes. So things like,ville invented a scale. Oh, the heat scale. The heat scale.

Yes. So things like, you know, the hottest curry you can get is called a naga. Right. And that is 855,000 on the Scoville scale. That is pretty hot.

I've just taken a quick look at the scale and by comparison, the chicken tikka masala is about 1,500 on the scale. A vindaloo is 250,000 on the scale. So your, what was it, a naga is sort of three to four times hotter than a vindaloo. That's, yikes. That is seriously, seriously hot stuff. I don't understand how that's enjoyable

i think you are just doing that for the bravado of it i agree but yes no i'm not into that me neither so what do you know of the history and spread of curry because obviously it it starts off in india yes but it seems to have spread to all corners of the world, really, doesn't it? Well, I know it's spread to sort of Africa and Japan and all sorts of other places. But what do you know about the spread? So we in this country had a reasonable amount to do with it because we used to have this nasty thing that we don't really talk about called the British Empire, which covered three quarters of the globe at one point. And one of the areas that the empire had a hold over was India. We did a lot of trade to and fro. We had the East India Company and we had sort of officers

and dignitaries living over in India. I think the East India Company had its headquarters in Bengal. And when our blokes came back to England, they brought some of their private chefs that they had employed over there with them. And they brought these recipes, these fantastic dishes that very few people over here knew about. And that was sort of the East India Company was going back as far as the 1600s so ever since the late 16 early 1700s these foods have sort of been introduced into british culture yes until such a point where we are now apparently the the indian the curry is unofficially

the the country's favorite dish yes well i think you're talking about importing chefs back. Queen Victoria had two Indian chefs on staff. Oh, did she? And they would cook her fresh curry every single day. Wow. Just in case anybody popped by. Just in case. Yeah. And if nobody popped by, then Queen Victoria would have a little curry herself. That's great.

I mean, she obviously enjoyed a curry. Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure whether she drank beer with it, but definitely a curry. have to hope so don't you a bit of cobra one would like a cobra um a complete aside but vaguely related i heard a story once that the the gentleman who created cobra beer which is an absolute staple of all Indian restaurants in this country. He had a business rival and the business rival set up a rival beer, which he called mongoose. A mongoose being the only thing that can stand up to a cobra. The mortal enemy of a cobra.

Yes, exactly. I don't wish to be partisan, but I have tried mongoose. It's very nice. That's all you're saying? Yes. be partisan but i have tried mongoose it's very nice that's all you're saying yes but there's lots of other stuff that goes with a curry there are sides and accoutrements galore would you like to talk about rice because rice is one of the big deals that goes with curry i'd love to talk about rice let's do it there are 40 000 varieties of rice no way yeah 40 with three zeros after yeah 40 000 varieties of rice it's a lot isn't it one of the most expensive is basmati okay and interestingly um basmati when it cooks it gets longer but not thicker

so that's a property of basmati, which is fairly special. Is that right? It gets about twice as long when you cook it. Right. Never knew that. Uncooked white rice. Have a guess how long it lasts. You know, a best before.

Right. Six months. Okay. Higher. A year. Higher. Two years. Higher.

Five. Higher. Ten. Higher. A century. You've overshot darn it uh uncooked white rice will last up to 30 years no way oh yeah so that bag of rice i've had sitting in the cupboard for the last year or so yeah that's still got another 29 years left in it it has so long as it's kept properly it'll keep keep for 30 years. That's astounding.

I know. I know. Brown rice, however, is slightly different to white rice because, well, I say it's different. It's exactly the same. Oh, that kind of different.

The kind of different where it's almost exactly the same. Exactly. So brown rice and white rice are exactly the same, except brown rice has like a bran coating around the white rice,

which you leave on if you want to have brown rice. Oh, I see. And that'll only last three to six months because the bran will go off but if you've taken the bran off and just just retain the white rice that'll last you a long time fascinating and then then you know you've got your side order of rice best marty rice or something like that yes and then you also have an have a have aan bread, which is like a flatbread, which is basically it's stretched and then sort of slapped on the side of an oven

and cooked on the side of an oven. I've seen that, yeah. They actually fling it to the outside of the clay oven, don't they? And it just heats up and then you peel it off. Yes, yeah. Sometimes you have to build a special oven for a naan bread,

especially when it's 10 foot by 4 foot. That's big. That's the biggest naan bread, especially when it's 10 foot by 4 foot. That's big. That's the biggest naan bread that was ever made. It was the equivalent of 167 normal naan breads. Good grief. And it took eight people to carry it. Oh, my word. Since we're dipping into that sort of area,

I've found the world's largest dozer. I had to actually look up what a dozer was. A dozer is sort of like a savoury crepe. Right. There was a food brand in India called MTR who only this year, in March 2024, they created a 123-foot long dozer. Okay.

It's quite big, isn't it? That's huge. Yeah, it was a shameless self-promotion thing but uh yeah good for them goodness me but the other thing of course you get on the side is poppadoms you do i do like a poppadom are you a karate chopper or do you take one of your own i take one of my own i put it on my side dish and i break it gently and neatly into pieces see i go out with people who are a little bit more shall we say extrovert than that and and basically as soon as the poppadoms arrive it's like whoever is the first one to just smash it with the side of their hand but then how do

you know that everyone has had their equal share well you don't oh i can't cope with that now i read um i read a poll that said now you you you personally have given me the alternative between would you rather have rice or a naan yes for me rice is non-negotiable i've always seen a naan bread as an alternative to a poppadom if you can't handle both oh i usually do um i i sort of see those two as bitter rivals and i would have thought that the poppadoms were more popular than the naans, but a survey of Indian restaurant goers in this country, 64% said they preferred a naan, 24% said they preferred a poppadom.

The others didn't really have an opinion. But that was staggering. I would clearly have thought that poppadoms would be more popular than naan breads. I stand corrected. Ah. There's very little. And apart from the really super hot ones, there's very little that I won't eat. Yes. And my excuse is that they are very, very healthy.

Are they? They are. I mean, chili is an anticoagulant, which is good to stave off heart attacks and strokes. Turmeric, really good anti-cancer and joint health. Cumin, antioxidants and antimicrobial. There's a lot of stuff in a curry that actually is very healthy for you. So you can actually say it's a health food. Fantastic. Does that compensate for the inordinate amounts of cream and butter and things that go into it as well?

It does. It does. It definitely offsets it. That's good. That's good to know. There was a record, like I said, sort of Indian food first came here in the late 1600s. By the early 1700s, London coffee houses were serving curry. You could go in for a curry and a coffee. The first record of one is the Norris Street Coffee House in London's Haymarket. They were selling curry in 1733.

Wow. Which is far earlier than I would have expected. And then various others followed, quite a big influx of them in the 1800s. And there was a report in a publication that was extolling the virtues of eating this stuff. And it reported that this food from the subcontinent, as they called it back then, was useful for stimulating the stomach, invigorating your blood flow, and it is also vigorous for the mind.

So even back in the early 1700s, they were saying exactly what you've just said. They recognised the health benefits of a curry. Yeah. Fantastic. Nowadays, in the UK, we have quite a lot of... OK, I'm going to call them Indian restaurants, or we could call them curry restaurants. Which would you rather?

Well, I don't know, because Indian restaurants isn't correct, because the vast of indian restaurants are actually bangladeshi yes let's call them curry restaurants then but then there's no such thing as a curry and then you go to birmingham and they're suddenly called balti houses yes that just throws an extra spanner in the works i know i know um but whatever you call them there are a lot of them there are how. How many are there? About two-thirds of all takeaway restaurants are curry houses. Really?

Crikey. About 10,000, roughly. I mean, I saw that figure and I just thought, that seems way too low. But two-thirds of all restaurants, all takeaway restaurants, are curry houses. Wow. That's a lot i i saw a similar figure i also saw that um indian restaurants people can't see me applying the air quotes but indian restaurants employ around 100 000 people in this country wow and they generate a revenue of around 4.2 billion pounds a year so this nation really does like a curry we do don't we

what's our favourite? Very, very favourite curry. Now, this has to be the tikka masala, doesn't it? It does, the chicken tikka masala. What can you tell me about that? This will have to be from memory because I forgot to research it. Okay. But I seem to remember that if you're pronouncing it,

you have to go chicken tikka masala. Tikka masala, aye. Because it came from Scotland. Aye, it didland it was somebody who was given a um a tandoori chicken yes and thought it was a bit dry and said where's my gravy and so the waiter went back to the kitchen and said there's a guy outside who wants some gravy with his chicken tikka and the chef said okay what have i got i've got some spices got some cream oh i've got a can of heinz tomato soup so basically combined heinz tomato soup

cream and indian spices and made a sauce for this guy to go with his chicken tikka now i really hope that's true i've i've read reports that say that's completely apocryphal but i really hope it's true i can totally see that from the color point of view because a chicken tikka masala is ostentatiously red yes it just really is but i can't taste tomatoes in it at all i have no idea what the components of the tikka masala are but i wouldn't say I tasted tomatoes in it at all. But it's a lovely story. I do hope it's true. I think it's true.

Let's assume it's true. There are things in the world that you don't know whether they're true or not. There are some things which are like that which you go, nah. Yeah. But there are other things in life where you go, do you know what? That's a nice story. Why not? Yes.

Why not? It's not doing anyone any harm to believe that. Exactly. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt. Yeah. I mean, that chicken tikka masala is is really popular and bizarrely we export chicken tikka masala to india no do we do how bizarre i know it's it's not i mean we invented it one of the indians haven't got a clue what it is because it's never really appeared in their cuisine.

Now, I find this interesting because it was invented in Scotland, yes, but it was invented by an Indian chef in an Indian restaurant in Scotland, and therefore it's completely authentic. But the folks back home will never have known anything about it. I only recently learned that the doner kebab was invented in Germany. Oh, that's why there are all these german doner places yes so doner d-o-n-e-r it has the two little dots yes doner the omelette yeah umlaut umlaut thank you not an omelette it replaces it replaces an e after the vowel yes that's right yes obviously completely authentic you know the the kebab restaurant was run by people from eastern climes i don't know where kebabs come from that's another subject yes um but because it was invented in germany it gets a german name um do you know of another uh indian dish that was also invented in this country tell

me the balti no of course yeah in is that in birmingham in birmingham so if the chicken tikka masala was invented in Glasgow around the 70s, the Balti was invented in Birmingham around the 1980s. I think the nicest thing about a Balti is that it actually means bucket. It does mean bucket. Isn't that a great fact? It's a bit like, you know, Kentucky Fried Chicken. The only other thing I know that you can actually acceptably have in a bucket. Brilliant.

Yes, the word originally means bucket. It then came to be the definition of a shallow sort of metal cast iron dish. Those are called Balty dishes. And therefore, this dish was invented in Birmingham and served on a Balty dish. And therefore, it became known as a Balty. Is this like serving chips in a wire basket? Yes, very much like that. Serving steak on a roofing slate.

On a roof tile. Yes, exactly. You can go slightly wrong if you try and name something that's Indian. Okay. Because there was a, Sharwoods in 2003 came up with something called a bund, B-U-N-D-H. Okay. Because there was a, uh, Sharwood's in 2003. Yeah. Uh, came up with something called a bund, B-U-N-D-H. Okay. Uh,

and then had to withdraw it quickly because it's Punjabi for ass. Oh, no. Oh, no, you really don't want to be going around eating something that's named after a bottom, do you? No.

Um, now you talked briefly about, uh, the fact that, that, that curries have sort of made their way around the world. I had a look at a few other national traditions of currying. It's interesting to sort of see the different variations of these spicy dishes that occur in each country.

In Japan, they do sort of very traditional curry and rice, but it's less spicy. They use a lot of pickled vegetables. Yes. Vietnamese curries use a lot of coconut milk, potatoes and cashew nuts. Okay. So you kind of add whatever you've got in the local area, you know, in Thai food, they use a lot of chilies, lemongrass, seafood, because it, you know, they can get it in that area. Can you explain to me why a thai green curry is hotter than a thai red curry because i to me red should mean technically that it's hotter i can and i can't i can tell you why thai curries have different colors okay it's because of their ingredients and why don't they have an amber one if it's traffic light? Well, there is a yellow one.

Is there? But it doesn't work in the same system. Okay. Thai red curry uses red chillies. Thai green curry uses green chillies. Thai yellow curry uses turmeric and no chillies. Okay. So they are literally the colour of the ingredients that are there within.

I would have assumed red chillies were hotter than green chillies, and therefore I would assume the red curry to be hotter than the green curry. It isn't because it makes more use of coconut milk in order to balance that heat out. So it actually ends up being slightly cooler. But if you didn't have the coconut milk, it would be exactly the scale that you have suggested. Yes. Well, how about that?

Curry in Japan became very, very popular with the military. And to this day, the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force, i.e. the Japanese Navy, traditionally serve curry every Friday for lunchtime. Oh, wow. I used to do that in an agency I owned. Oh, did you? We used to have Friday lunchtime curries. Wonderful. What a great tradition.

Another place that curries have spread to is South Africa. I had no idea. The largest population of Indian people living outside of India is in Durban in South Africa. Oh, right. I've no idea as to the historical context for why that is the case, but apparently it is. And therefore they've taken a lot of their dishes with them.

So curries are really, popular in south africa there's one south african twist on a curry called bunny chow okay and um as far as i can tell it's got nothing to do with rabbits so i don't understand the word but essentially they pour curry into a hollowed out loaf of bread and you just descend upon it and eat it with your hands wow isn't that great but the ingredients that go into curry are generally high quality good ingredients but some of the ingredients are incredible i mean things like you know saffron is is really i mean it's like four and a half thousand pounds a pound is it really yeah it's it's hand it has to be hand picked from crocuses

wow and very delicately so it's it's enormous i think it's the most expensive food product right on earth it comes from the the pollen doesn't it it's a stamen in the sense it's the stamen that's right the stamen of a stamen of crocus one of my favorite facts about place names and words and etymology is around crocuses um apparently back in the olden times i don't know how old and i can't remember but hundreds if not thousands of years ago there was an area south of what we would now call london yeah where they grew an awful lot of crocuses in a valley yes and the old english word for Crocus Valley was Crocidian, which eventually became Croydon.

Ah! Isn't that great? There was a place called Walden. Right. And they grew a lot of crocuses there. And as a marketing technique, they basically changed the name of the town from Walden to Saffron Waldron. Saffron Waldron.

Yeah. Wonderful. Wonderful. to saffron saffron waldron yeah wonderful although saffron's very expensive it doesn't make the most expensive curries okay the most expensive curry that i could find and then you may have found a more expensive one i'm not sure i never looked at price so you've got this one hands down okay well you know we were talking about like the heat of a curry being like a boy's challenge. Yes. I think there's like a city boy type challenge as well, which is like to spend the most money that you possibly can on like a bottle of wine or on whatever. The largest bottle of champagne.

Yes, exactly. If you go to the Bombay Brasserie, I don They sold a thing called Samundari Kazana. Okay. And Samundari Kazana would set you back £4,000 a portion. It had gold in it and stuff. Oh my goodness. Edible gold and all sorts of weird things. That's just silly.

Yes. Why would you pay £4,000 a portion? It's just very silly. Purely because you can. I know. I know. And because it's showing off to your friends. Yes.

But to quote Jurassic Park, as I often do these days, you're so busy thinking about whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should. That's very true. There's a very useless fact, which is, frankly frankly what this podcast is all about yes absolutely which is in switzerland in cludo the character of colonel mustard is called madam curry really yeah how do you come up i mean that is such a tangent bruce oh isn't that silly that's definitely madamame curry not madame curie well yes

exactly definitely madame curry i mean because like mustard is is in switzerland mustard is quite mild is it okay it's got that sort of tenth feel to it's like the sort of like the stuff you get with um frankfurters and things it's just it's very okay yes yes okay whereas you know in in in britain that colonel mustard means kind of like mustard yes strength so madam curry i don't know why they changed gender or and reduced in rank but oh wonderful i hadn't realized that mustard is actually used in quite a lot of indian cooking is it really? Yeah. So curries, which don't exist, are actually quite old. We already talked about how old the word was. But there was an archaeological dig in Pakistan,

which came up with remains dated to about 2600 BC. And in this dig, they found a pastel and mortar with traces of fennel, cumin and mustard. And the skeletons that they excavated as well also had traces of these things in the human remains. So people have been eating this kind of food in this kind of area since 2,500 BC. So it's quite old.

Wow, did they manage to find lots of toilet paper hanging around in the back of the cave? It didn't say so, no. So Simon, you're always digging around in the Guinness Book of Records. Have you found anything in the Guinness Book of World Records for curries? Yes, I found a couple more curry-related records. One was the largest curry, according to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest curry was served in Singapore. And it weighed 15.34 tons.

And it fed an entire town. I'm not surprised. And I also found a record for the most quickly eaten curry. Oh, it's like competitive eating of curries. Competitive eating of curries. Oh, wow. Can you imagine eating quickly and really spicy food?

That's going to be a heck of a combination. What's the record? Right, so this was in Cardiff Bay. This was a student in Cardiff Bay. He was eating at the British Curry Club restaurant and it was Save the Bengal Tiger week. So the restaurant was putting on these events to you know raise money and um this this young chap this student ate 500 grams of vindaloo

impressive pretty hot stuff in two minutes and 35 seconds how many grams 500 so that's a pound sure a pound of curry in two and a half minutes jeez i there was no record of stating how he felt afterwards no but one can only imagine but being a student you know standard fare nothing else to do in the afternoons anyway yeah the one final curry relatedrelated fact I have is, you know the term to curry favour? Yes. Has absolutely nothing to do with curry. Oh.

Yeah. It's a bit deflating, isn't it? It comes from an old French-Germanic word, courrier, which gives us the same origin as courier, or to carry. Nothing to do with curry, but I just thought I'd throw that in there well it's nice apart from finding out you know interesting facts we also find out things that don't exist absolutely we will bust a myth with the best of them like curry no curry doesn't exist it's not real you've imagined it you know you know those things that

don't exist oh yes those i really those. I really fancy one now. I would really like one as well. Let's go out, shall we? Shall we? In fact, everybody who's listening to the episode, within the next week, see if you can get yourself a curry. Yes.

And you can tell us about your experiences. You can go to our Facebook page. You can go to our website, factorely.com, and you can comment. You can tell us about your best slash worst experience of a curry. Oh, yes. So there we go. That is the end of another fabulous, fascinating,

fact-filled episode of Fact Orally. I love an alliteration. Thank you for coming. Until next time, thank you for listening to Fact Orally. Goodbye. Cheerio.