Kofta kari - well - curried meatballs any which way
"I sometimes stand back and look at how my girls fast-track my recipes and wonder, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" Charmaine Solomon
I thought this would turn out to be one of those articles about authenticity, but I have now come to the conclusion that there is no authentic kofta curry recipe. In fact I'm not sure there is any single thing that is a constant in all the recipes I found. Well - balls I suppose. But balls made from just about anything - meat, fish, vegetables - there's probably even cheese ones somewhere. And size is not consistent either. Intriguingly most of the pictures I found were of largish meatballs and most of the recipes were for small meatballs. As to the sauce - well see the above.
In fact it is so inauthentic that I can't find a recipe from Madhur Jaffrey, for example, at all - other than for cocktail kind of meatballs. Charmaine Solomon does have a couple of versions in her earlier books - one is a Kashmiri version with no onions or garlic and the other a more general one in her Indian Cooking for Pleasure. But in her much later Charmaine Solomon's Family Recipes she just gives her daughter's version, which she maintains is the version that they now mostly cook. And it is interesting how the two vary. The original version had a few more spices in the meatballs themselves, but fewer in the sauce. She used to fry the meatballs first, her daughter does not, and the daughter's tomatoes are tinned, not fresh, peeled and chopped. As she says in her introduction to the modern version:
"The dish loses none of its original appeal as all the essential spices and flavours are represented."
My old faithful Cooking the Indian Way also has a recipe and also another not much used Indian cookery book by Khalid Aziz called The Encyclopedia of Indian Cooking. Both of these are relatively plain although I have made them both in the past and they were good. Claudia Roden only flavours her meatballs with salt and pepper which seems really just too basic.
The other things that the various recipes argued about were whether to put breadcrumbs in the meatball mix (or semolina, somebody suggested) to lighten them, the aforesaid whether to fry or not, whether to add egg to the mix or not, and then what the basis of the sauce was - tomato, yoghurt, stock, even cheese I saw in one version.
I think the basic principle is that you put things like fresh herbs, chilli and garlic in the meatballs and the spices like paprika, cumin, coriander, turmeric in the sauce. Hugh Fearnley- Whittingstall goes for double mint as he puts it - dried mint in the meatballs and fresh in the sauce. And he's the one with cheese in the sauce.
So I shall improvise - which is what I talk about a lot. I have all this parsley. And some mint and coriander too that have to be used or they will go off. There might also be some dill - so I shall have to decide which ones to use and which not. All of them would be just too much. And I do like fresh herbs, so I think some in the meatballs and lots as a finish to the sauce at the end. They seem to taste better that way. If I've got any leftover commercial curry paste in the fridge, I'll use that (but I think I haven't). I do have some leftover sauce from those disappointing lamb chops though, so maybe that can go in. I've just got to curb my natural inclination to put in too many different flavours.
And I still don't really know whether this is an 'authentic' Indian dish and if it is which part of India it hails from. Or is it as broad as pasta say with the number of regional variations there are to that? One search for 'kofta curry authentic' seemed to give me a whole lot of Pakistani versions and on the whole most of the Indian recipes seemed to hail from the centre and the north rather than the south. Who knows. My old Time/Life book had a picture of one version from a posh Indian hotel, that had pretty huge meatballs and silver leaf on the top. I was about to say that perhaps kofta curry was such a poor dish it wasn't really well thought of, and then I thought of the silver leaf and decided not.
Fatty meat is best though. They all said that. Here are some pictures I found to show the variety.
And I don't have any daughters, but I have two sons who cook and one daughter-in-law, one ex long-time partner to my son, and also his new partner - and they all do amazing things in the kitchen - some of them with recipes I gave them a long time ago, but which they have made their own in many different ways. I guess that's what cooks do. I'm pretty sure that any kofta curry recipe you find today will have a much lighter and fresher feel to it than the old ones. Spicier too. In my youth we just had curry powder and none of the actual spices that made up that curry powder. Let alone fresh coriander or dill.
