DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Before the Web, there was Usenet. This was a long time ago, around 1992 when I was first online. I used to spend my lunch hours — wait, who am I kidding, I spent whole workdays cruising a handful of newsgroups, seeking knowledge, entertainment, power, love, and curry.

I printed out two recipes for Indian curry because they sounded too good to be true. I carefully put them into a binder, along with recipes passed from friends and clipped from the newspaper. I carried the binder from apartment to house to house, frequently flipping to the curry pages and then moving past them for any of a variety of reasons, such as “I just ran out of whole green cardamom pods” or “Eww, this recipe calls for yogurt.” I printed these recipes in 1992 but never actually made them.

Last week I noticed the recipes again and thought, “I could eat the hell out of a curry right now.” I dispatched my wife to the whole-spice store, and the yogurt store too. Thursday would be our Usenet Curry Experience.

“This is the real thing,” boasts the recipe. “Throw out your curry powder: you’ll never use it again once you’ve tried this recipe.” You can imagine why I kept it around for 12 years. “Chicken curry using the real spices cannot be beat!”

Eagerly I minced 10 cloves of garlic (!) and a lump of ginger. I counted out the peppercorns, the cloves, the cardamom. I split the star anise to expose the fragrant seeds inside. I diced a jalapeno, measured turmeric and chili powder. My Mise en Place looked like the set of Yan Can Cook; I just needed the angled mirror overhead.

Once in Germany, a long time ago but actually several years after my Usenet curry recipes had begun their exile in my recipe binder, we stayed with friends who prepared an authentic Indian curry. The chef haphazardly tossed some whole spices into a frypan, then topped them with onions and garlic and a melange of other stuff. The result, the cook’s offhand manner notwithstanding, was outrageously good. He had a knack.

He told us he’d cut back on the amount of chili peppers called for in a truly authentic curry. He said that in his salad days, when instead of salad he ate lots of curry, he once made the full-bore recipe. He lived to make curry again, but not with all those peppers. “I had to put the toilet paper in the refrigerator” was all he would say about the episode.

With visions of such nonchalant excellence, I tossed my whole spices into the frypan. I topped them with garlic, ginger, chilis. I added spinach, dried spices, and yoghurt. I added tofu (hey, I had to draw the line somewhere). I cooked and stirred and smiled at the great aromas coming up from the pan.

The recipe makes frequent references to “gravy.” This tipped me off that perhaps all was not well with my curry. There’s very little liquid in the recipe: just oil and a half-cup of yogurt. One half-cup of liquid does not make gravy. And the oil had long since soaked into the onions.

Nevertheless, I was steadfast in my faith. I continued to cook, looking forward to a big plate of killer curry.

Well, I’m still looking forward to it. This curry was bland. I don’t know what happened to all that garlic and ginger and cinnamon and cardamom and anise and etc. You’d never know it to taste this dish. It was practically flavorless. Wait, that’s not true — I could taste the rice.

The recipe says it can’t be beat, but in fact it can — by a $1.49 jar of Madras Curry sauce from TJ’s.