Monkfish Curry

Curry has been known in Great Britain since the mid-eighteenth century (see page 105), not just through Indian restaurants opened by immigrants—the first of which appeared in 1759, in London—but as prepared by chefs at non-Indian establishments, and even by home cooks. Thackeray has one fed to an unsuspecting Becky Sharp by the Sedleys, for instance, in Vanity Fair, his 1847-vintage satire on British society (see page 103). Queen Victoria was introduced to curry by her Indian secretary, Abdul Karim, who also taught her Urdu; according to Heston Blumenthal, she ate curry every day for the last thirteen years of her life. Curries prepared in the U.K. by chefs who are not themselves South Asian tend to employ that ubiquitous seasoning known as curry powder. In his own curries, like this one from Hix Oyster and Fish House in Lyme Regis, chef Mark Hix prefers individual spices instead. “I like to use firm fish for this,” he says, “like monkfish, huss [a kind of small shark or dogfish, sometimes called rock salmon, popularly used for fish and chips], or ling.”Recipe courtesy of cookbook The British Table: A New Look at the Traditional Cooking of England, Scotland, and Wales by Colman Andrews. Click here to purchase your own copy.