Curry

(Childhood Memories of Food in the 1960s)

School dinners were always served as if to a template. The plate was divided into three areas. There was meat, or fish on a Friday, even for non Catholics. I don’t recall ever meeting a vegetarian. There was the potato section, boiled, mashed or chips on a Friday if the fish was fried. Then there was the vegetable section, cabbage, carrots, peas, cauliflower and, occasionally, spaghetti.
    Cabbage was a school dinner regular. It would be boiled for hours until the smell filled the entire school and the flavour was transferred to the water. The water was then thrown away.
    “Spaghetti isn’t a vegetable,” I hear you say. It was when I was a boy. Long smooth strands in a bright orange coloured sauce, one of Mr. Heinz’s fifty seven. The BBC once did an April fool spoof news report about the Italian spaghetti harvest, with long strands of spaghetti shown being gathered from trees. A few years earlier and I would have believed it.
    What did foreigners eat? We all knew that.
    The French ate frogs and snails. We imagined them on the plate between the potato and cabbage instead of proper meat. We had no idea how they might be cooked so we imagined them as slimy, the snails with their eyes still on stalks and the frogs still green.
    The Italians ate spaghetti, no meat or cabbage, but platefuls of white strands in orange coloured sauce. Occasionally it made a pleasant change, but every day?
    The Germans ate sausage. Not the firm juicy butchers sausage that went with mash and gravy but something unpleasant from a tin. They ate it with something called saurkraut. We had no idea what saurkraut was, but it was German, so it was bound to be horrid.
    The Japanese ate raw fish, accompanied by rice pudding without milk and sugar in it. Yuk.
    Africans ate each other.
    We got these ideas from comics and from War Picture Library which moulded our view of foreigners and people we still thought of as the enemy. 
    Indians ate curry. 
    Our idea of an Indian was fairly flexible, but we knew that they were brown people who wore turbans and were part of the Commonwealth, which was like the Empire and still ours really.
    We all knew what curry was. We ate it ourselves.
    Curry was never eaten on a Monday, and Friday was fish, so curry was always a midweek meal, usually Wednesday. Those of us who went on to work in factories discovered that curry was  sometimes served in the lunchtime canteen and was obviously made to the same recipe as school dinner curry.
    You always knew when to expect curry. If Tuesday’s dinner was stew, then you knew that Wednesday was a curry day. We always assumed that curry was made with left over stew, but logically, that couldn’t be the case. It was more likely that a double ration of meat was boiled up on a Tuesday for Tuesday’s stew and Wednesday’s curry.
    To make curry, curry powder was added to the previously boiled stew meat. A quantity of sultanas was added to this mixture and it was boiled yet again. There was never any chance of eating anything that was under cooked.
    When curry was served, you had your usual heaps of potatoes and vegetables. Between them was a pile of curry alongside an extra heap of rice pudding without milk and sugar in it.
    As we ate our curry we imagined the poor Indians  who were eating stew with curry powder and sultanas in it every day. We thought how fortunate we were to have a varied diet unlike almost everyone else in the world. We usually left the rice on the plate. With any luck there would be proper rice pudding for afters. How sad, we thought, that Indians didn’t have pudding.