История японского карри: от британского рецепта до национальной кухни с собственным музеем

In a survey conducted in the early 1980s, the Japanese named curry and rice (kare raisu) as one of their three favourite home-cooked dishes (the others were pork cutlets and vegetable stir-fry), while Japanese schoolchildren voted it the best meal served for school lunch. In Japan, there is a saying that you are never more than five minutes away from a curry shop. (For authentic Indian food, you have to go to an indoryori restaurant.) From 2001 to 2007, there was even a curry museum in Yokohama, a sort of curry theme park featuring hostesses wearing saris, exhibits on the history of curry and spices, and a food court that served an array of curries and dishes made with curry powder, including Okinawan curry made with sake, an omelette-rice curry, a curry cocktail and curry chocolate. A Japanese curry is a distinctive dish. It consists of chunks of meat (usually chicken, beef and shrimp), carrots, onions and potatoes simmered in an ochre-coloured, currypowder-flavoured, slightly sweetish sauce. The sweetness comes from apples or honey. Often a fried pork cutlet (tonkatsu) is placed on top. The rice and curry are served separately on a Western-style plate, to be mixed later, and are eaten with a spoon. Pickled vegetables or ginger, an essential component of a Japanese meal, are served on the side. In many ways, curry is the antithesis of Japanese food, which is based on the principle that ingredients should retain their natural appearance and taste. Japanese food historian Elizabeth Andoh recalls her disgust at her first encounter with “dreadful curry rice with a terrible smell which nauseated me”. But there are many reasons for curry’s popularity. Housewives like it because it is convenient, inexpensive and easy to make in microwave ovens. It is the Japanese version of comfort food with no pretensions to class or elegance. It is never served in upmarket restaurants, at parties or receptions, or to guests, but, as Japanese food expert Richard Hosking writes, “Schoolboys love it and anyone planning a summer camp or a winter skiing holiday would be making a great mistake not to include it at least once on the menus.” The spiciness of curry offers a welcome contrast to the blandness of traditional Japanese food. The curry flavour comes from either powder or from a ready-made roux – a block of spices and flour suspended in animal fat. Scored for easy separation, these blocks range from mild to very hot. The most popular brands are S&B Foods Inc. (the name is a variation on C&B, standing for Crosse and Blackwell) and House Foods Corporation – multi-billion-dollar international companies founded in the 1920s. House Foods produced the first block of curry roux in 1960. A few years later it launched a line of roux with the odd name Vermont Curry (perhaps because it contains apples), a milder, sweeter version designed to appeal to children. The 1970s saw the creation of the hermetically sealed pouch that can hold foods without refrigeration and be reheated in boiling water. Today these bags account for 40 per cent of packaged curry sales. Unlike British curries, which sometimes use leftovers, Japanese curries are usually made from fresh meat. Curry came to Japan in 1868 at the beginning of the Meiji Era (1868–1912), when Japanese ports were again opened to foreigners. (In the late 16th century, Portuguese traders and missionaries entered Japan and were sequestered for more than two hundred years in a small trading post near Nagasaki. They introduced stews, pastries, bread and fried foods such as tempura and cutlets.) Small communities of English merchants in Kobe and other cities brought manufactured curry powders. Articles in women’s magazines and recipe books taught housewives how to make curry, and its popularity spread quickly. A Japanese cookbook, Seiyo Ryori Tsu (The Western Cooking Expert, 1872), describes a curry stew very similar to the curried chicken recipe in Mrs Beeton’s cookbook of 1861. There were several reasons why curry caught on in Japan. One was a fascination for all things Western during the Meiji and Taisho eras (1912–26). Curry belongs to a category of foods called yoshoku, Western dishes adapted to local tastes. These dishes also used ingredients such as potatoes, tomatoes, onions, eggs, chicken, beef, pork and butter that were not commonly used in Japanese cooking. The military wanted to encourage meat consumption as a way of building up the physiques of Japanese youth and found curry-rice an ideal way to incorporate vegetables, rice and meat in one inexpensive substantial meal. The Emperor Meiji told everyone to start eating meat (which had been discouraged by Buddhism) and ate it himself. Curry became a staple of menus of Japanese steamships travelling to Europe. In 1930, a merchant who had tried curry rice on board put it on the menu of the cafeteria in his department store in Osaka, where it became the best-selling dish. Curry houses were soon opened throughout the country. Today Japanese chains have branches in the United States such as Curry House, Coco Ichibanya and GoGo Curry. The Honolulu branch of Curry House features cheese, banana, hotdog, fried chicken and squid curries. They are available in seven levels of “hotness” and with different quantities of rice, up to a 1,300-gram serving that is free for anyone who can eat it in 20 minutes. In 2007, GoGo Curry opened its first American branch in New York City. It is a kind of shrine to New York Yankees star Hideki Matsui. (GoGo means 55 in Japanese, Matsui’s number when he played for the Yomiuri Giants.) The restaurant offers 55 cents off any entrée on days that Matsui hits a home run. Rice is served in five different-sized portions: walk, single, double, triple and grand slam. A popular Japanese fast food is curry bread (kare pan): curry wrapped in a piece of dough dipped in breadcrumbs (panko) and deep-fried. A character named Kare Pan Man, whose head is made of curry bread, is one of the superheroes in Anpanman, one of the most popular Japanese anime cartoon series. Curry is also a popular homemade dish in Korea. It is usually made Japanese-style from ready-made mixes. Excerpted with permission from Curry: A Global History, Colleen Taylor Sen, Pan Macmillan India. We welcome your comments at [email protected].