[Sca-cooks] Weirdly simple but confusing Indian dish...

[Susan Fox-Davis]

Looking at a map... well there's one big island off the southeast of India - Sri
Lanka!  Straight east of there through the Bay of Bengal, we hit the Andaman
Islands and Nicobar Islands, also Indian possessions.  I'm running out of time
before my work deadline or I'd look... hit your favorite search engine hard with
keywords like chicken, coconut, fried and place names like Bengal, Bangladesh,
Calcutta, Sri Lanka, Chennai, Madras.

Adamantius has the right of it;  Chicken a'la Malabar appears to be an English
dish inspired by India from Eliza Acton in 1845.
<http://www.lesliegeddesbrown.com/recipes16-06-00.htm>
Mrs. Acton does not seem to include Coconut in her recipe.


Here's a nice Mango Chutney anyway:
       1/4 cup refined oil,
       1 teaspoon mustard seeds,
       1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder,
       1+1/2 kg raw mango,
       1/2 teaspoon salt,
       1 cup water,
       5 cups sugar

 Method:

 Skin the mangoes. Remove the seeds and cut the mangoes into small pieces.
 Keep them aside. Heat the oil in a pan. Sprinkle the mustard seeds into the
oil.
 Just as the seeds start to crack, add the turmeric powder, salt and mango
 pieces into the pan. Stir them thoroughly and add the water. Allow the whole
 thing to come to a boil. Add sugar to it and continue boiling. The chutney will
be
 thickening. In the process continuous stirring is a must. When the chutney
 becomes thick remove the pan from burner. Let it cool to normal temperature.
 Fridge and serve cold.

Contributed by : Sushreeta Chakraborty, Calcutta.

Happy hunting!
Best, Selene C.

Yamil O Kiwan wrote:

> Yes I have encountered a similar dish here in California. When I asked about
> it they told me this was a regional style attributed to the southeastern
> islands of India. I didn't know India had islands?
>
> Jamal
>
> > From: "Phil Troy/ G. Tacitus Adamantius" <adamantius.magister at verizon.net>
> > Reply-To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> > Date: Thu, 8 Aug 2002 11:23:23 -0400
> > To: sca-cooks at ansteorra.org
> > Subject: [Sca-cooks] Weirdly simple but confusing Indian dish...
> >
> > It was called Malabar Chicken, but unlike the four billion
> > Malabar chicken recipes all over the Web and elsewhere, it was not a
> > chicken curry with coconut milk. This was a lightly-spiced series of
> > pounded chicken cutlets, dipped in a coconut-cream egg wash, coated
> > with shredded coconut, and sauteed. Served very simply with mango
> > chutney. It was a simple, but very good, dish, but I found it hard to
> > imagine there wasn't, to put it gently, a heavy Western influence.
> >
> > Has anybody encountered this one?