The Complete Curry Cookbook is the seventh in a series of cookbooks by celebrated Australian cook Charmaine Solomon, and one of several co-authored with her husband Reuben.  A native of Sri Lanka, Charmaine turned a penchant for cooking into a thirty-odd cookbooks and a successful line of custom spice blends and marinades.  Like Diana Kennedy, Ms. Solomon is something of a culinary missionary and is often credited with having introduced authentic Asian cuisine to Australian home cooks.   Even at the height of her popularity Ms. Solomon viewed herself as a “homemaker who likes cooking better than the other aspects of housekeeping”.  Husband Reuben is a musician by trade but an “appreciative audience” and business partner.  As of this writing Charmaine Solomon is still living, although no longer actively writing or cooking.  Reuben passed away in 2009.

I picked up my copy of The Complete Curry Cookbook at a Goodwill in Oregon sometime in the early 2000s, during my starving student years.  I had no context for Mrs. Solomon’s reputation or acclaim.  My needs were simple.  I had a young family with an adventuresome palate that exceeded our modest budget, and we found that a small upfront investment in spices paid dividends long term.   For a few dollars we could put together a delicious and filling meal from a couple of cans of chickpeas or dried lentils.  We were also starting to explore spicier foods, in part to combat the nasty head colds that seemed to plague our family for the first several years we lived in Pacific Northwest.   The Complete Curry Cookbook, along with A Taste of the Far East, were well-worn resources during our student years.  Twenty years later we’re out of school and the head colds are long gone but our appetite for spicy curries has only grown stronger. 

The proper title for this book would be The Complete Indian and Southeast Asian Curry Cookbook; home chefs looking for Japanese or Chinese curries will come up empty-handed.  From a marketing perspective it would be perfectly awful title, but it’s a more accurate reflection of its contents.   And with regards to these specific cuisines it very nearly earns the “complete” in the title, something few cookbooks are able to do.   The opening chapter provides recipes for fifteen different curry powders and pastes, but these are used sparingly in the recipes that follow.   Most of the nearly hundred curry variants in the pages that follow have their own customized spice blends.  “Complete” may be unattainable, but the Solomons’ collection is certainly exhaustive.

Outside of the dust jacket there is little context and precious few illustrations or photographs.  The reader is given some general guidance on serving and preparing curries, including tips for regional variants.  The recipes that follow are thoughtfully written, but assume some familiarity with the introductory material.  This can make The Complete Curry Cookbook quite intimidating, in that many recipes seem like impossibly long lists of ingredients with very little direction on their proper preparation.  But don’t be put off.  Start with some of the shorter recipes and work your way through until you get the hang of it. 

The core of the book are the curry recipes, with individual chapters for meat, seafood, poultry, and vegetable curries.   There are over a dozen different beef curries and nearly twice as many chicken curries, along with recipes for liver and offal curries of various animals.  The seafood curries run the gamut from basic white fish in coconut milk to all manner of shellfish.  The vegetable chapter is the shortest but the most varied, with recipes incorporating squash, legumes, eggplant, and potatoes.  There is little repetition:  the lamb and pork vindaloo recipes, for example, are entirely different.  A creative home chef might easily find endless variations by mixing and matching sauces with proteins.

There are also two excellent chapters on accompaniments.  One chapter is devoted to starches, and includes instructions for properly preparing rice as well as recipes for a variety of Indian flatbreads.  The other focuses on condiments, including chutneys and sambal, or vegetable side dishes.

This book, more than anything, taught me how to coax the flavor out of my spices: when to toast spices dry, when to cook them in oil, and when to use whole spices instead of ground (hint: almost always).   The individual recipes are, by and large, exceptional but the short course on technique has been more valuable in the long term.

The only challenge that the home chef may face is finding some of the recommended ingredients.  I live within spitting distance of a half-dozen high quality Indian markets, but realize not everyone has such an embarrassment of riches.  Even in my area ingredients like fresh galangal or candle nuts can still be difficult to come by, and there are several ingredients for which there is no acceptable substitute.   There are still many dozens of recipes that can be prepared from ingredients in Western supermarkets, but there are a few that always seem tantalizingly out of reach.

One of the more interesting (and less intimidating) recipes in The Complete Curry Cookbook is the Fried Pork Curry.   Pork may seem an unusual ingredient for a curry, given that many of the predominant religions in Asia forbid it.  And while it is certainly off-limits for observant Hindus and Muslims, pork is quite common in Southeast Asian cuisine.  In addition to the Fried Pork Curry, The Complete Curry Cookbook offers recipes for four other pork curries from Sri Lanka, Malaysia, and Burma, plus a pork vindaloo recipe from non-vegetarian populations in South India.

In the traditional recipe the pork is cubed and slow cooked in a thick and fragrant mixture of spices and aromatics.  The pork is then removed from the gravy and crisp-fried in its own fat, then returned to the gravy and served over rice.  The combination of slow cooking and frying – sort of a reverse braise – makes the pork belly seem impossibly decadent.  The exterior has the crunch of breakfast bacon while the interior remains moist and fall-apart tender.  It pairs wonderfully with the rich, aromatic gravy.

Pork belly, unfortunately, is quite variable in quality and fat content.  While there is a time and place for the high-fat, skin-on cuts typically found in Asian markets, this recipe demands the leanest boneless belly you can find, skin removed.  There will still be plenty of intramuscular fat to keep things tender, but a thick fat cap simply won’t render properly.  I am able to procure a 3-4 lb lean pork belly frozen from my local specialty butcher for about five or six dollars a pound.  If you can’t find good quality pork belly, a well-trimmed pork shoulder or pork blade roast is an acceptable substitute.

When I make this at home I prefer to cook the pork belly sous vide to optimize both texture and flavor.  It requires a little bit more advance planning but noticeably improves an already decadent recipe.  The tightly controlled cooking temperature keeps the pork belly from getting too mushy during the long cook, and it allows the flavor to penetrate the meat completely.  I’ve provided instructions for both conventional and sous vide methods in the recipe below.  If you want some additional pointers on sous vide cooking I’ve provided a brief primer here.