Make the Bread, Buy the Butter - Jennifer Reese [111]
CURRY LEAF TREE
Even if you never make your own vadouvan curry spice (which you shouldn’t), if you cook much Indian food there will come a day when you want a steady supply of fresh curry leaves. Confusingly, the curry leaf has nothing to do with curry powder. Curry powder is a blend of spices, available at any grocery store, that typically includes turmeric, cumin, and coriander and only occasionally crushed dried curry leaf. Curry leaf comes from the curry tree and is typically used fresh and green. It is about the size of a small bay leaf and has an intense fragrance—slightly smoky, slightly metallic—for which there is no substitute. It is as essential to certain Indian dishes as sage is to Thanksgiving stuffing, but it’s much more delicious than sage. I drove all over the greater San Francisco Bay Area one winter looking for curry leaves during what turned out to be a temporary import ban. A friend gave me a few leaves from her freezer stash, which disappeared in one recipe of masala chicken.
I decided I needed a curry tree. After I asked at the local nurseries and was met with blank looks, I tracked down an outfit in New Jersey that would sell me a four-inch Murraya koenigii for fifteen dollars. Even after the gentleman on the end of the line calculated interstate inspection and shipping and announced, somewhat sheepishly, that the tree would in fact cost seventy dollars, I took a deep breath and ordered it. I assumed the tree would be the size of a healthy potted geranium and soon it would grow to the size of a ficus, become a feature of our living room decor, and I would be in curry leaves forever.
A few weeks later, a diminutive package arrived that contained a specimen resembling one of the bean seedlings a first grader brings home in a Dixie cup. It was a few inches tall, each of its eleven leaves the size of a lentil. I put it in a sunny spot, watered it faithfully, and fertilized it periodically, and after a year it grew perhaps an inch. Two years later, the wispy curry tree still sits on the living room chest, its twenty leaves now the size of navy beans. Perhaps it will surprise me with a growth spurt, but I fully expect it to accompany me to assisted living a few decades hence looking approximately the same and I will breathe its exotic fragrance and rue all the pilaus I never made.
If you are in a nursery and see a flourishing curry leaf plant for twenty or thirty dollars, pull out your wallet. If you’re in an Indian grocery and see fresh curry leaves, buy the place out and put them in your freezer. The import ban has been lifted, and last I checked, I could have bought 280 curry leaves for the price of my bonsai.
CHAPTER 20
DESSERTS
When my children were little, my husband worked the night shift at the San Francisco Chronicle, which left the three of us at home alone most nights. I didn’t want to watch TV—not the shows they liked, anyway—and I didn’t want to play endless games of Candy Land, or any games of Candy Land, ever, so we’d have dinner and then I’d pour a glass of wine and Isabel and I would bake cakes or cookies or scones, sometimes all three, while Owen played with his trains at our feet. I’d have another glass of wine, and though I thought I was very unlucky to be stuck at home alone with small children every night, it was actually very merry. A friend started calling me the Tipsy Baker and when I started a cooking blog, that’s what I named it, though now I am embarrassed to explain its origin.
I don’t remember being particularly contented in those years, but now I look back at those nights standing around the mixer as some of the happiest of my life.
ANGEL PIE
This was my mother’s recipe, passed down from her own mother, who probably cut it off the