Lentil Curry

And Other New Things

Growing up, curry wasn’t a word that I heard. If you had asked me at the beginning of high school what it meant, I (being the eminently likable tenth grader that I was) probably would have responded something like “curry, verb, to seek the favor of someone of something through directed action.”

My pretentiousness notwithstanding, my lack of familiarity with a spice that is commonly used across the world says something to the experiences I had had at that point. I was born and raised in Covington, Georgia, a place that most people my age can’t even find on a map of the state. The kids that I went to school with were largely the same as me — born in Covington without much experience elsewhere. When I was in elementary school, my mom could review the roster for my class and know about half of the other students’ parents. That’s the kind of town I’m talking about.

I often like to refer to Covington as a cowtown, partly because the word looks similar to Covington, but also partly because I think I probably saw more new cows in Covington than I ever did new people. Especially in my young days, people new to Covington were a rare breed; new cows arrived pretty much daily. Which brings me to Sri. Sri was a kind and quiet Indian girl whose presence in my high school classes I would have missed altogether were she not just a little different from everyone else. I found that people tended to naturally gravitate toward or away from her, which confused me. Sure, she was Indian, but there were other Indian students at our school, and in many ways she was like any other student at Eastside. The only real markers of difference I could discern about her were the swarm of words that surrounded discussions about her. Words like foreign, Hindu, and curry.

I thought about Sri when I found the next recipe I was going to tackle: lentil curry. The recipe was a little more complex than I was used to, but after a few ups and downs with my slow cooker, I was ready to tackle something more challenging. I had a lot of the ingredients already and those that I didn’t have were easily obtainable.

I started by sautéing the vegetables. The onions and carrots smelt good and looked better, lightly brown in the pan. The carrots reminded me of laddu, a kind of sweet that Sri has shared with me one time. It was tangy and super-dense, almost to the point of being hard to eat. I only had one, but at least I tried it. Almost everyone else in class turned down the strange Indian food that they had never seen or heard of. In fact, many of my classmates seemed to have a cultivated fear of Sri and her culture. I remember someone once asking her about her religious beliefs in an almost genuinely curious way. I couldn’t pinpoint what was off about the conversation until the guy asked her if she had ever been a butterfly in a previous life.

The vegetables had sautéed and the most challenging part was over. I threw everything into the pot, saving the coconut milk. I had never tried it, but I was optimistic about it. I dipped my finger in for a taste, found it sweet and creamy. Strange. The kind of strange that I wasn’t sure would work well in a spicy dish. But I had it and the recipe called for it, so I put it in.

Another time, I overheard a group of students saying that Sri smelled like curry. I didn’t know the smell (a few months before I didn’t even know the word), but it intrigues me. They explained to me (wrongly) that curry is what all Indian people smell like because it’s all that they eat. The logic seemed a little weird to me, but it passed my low-standard inspection at the time.

The last thing I added to the pot was the curry. Saffron-colored powder tumbled out and over the whole dish. I mixed everything together. Now all that was left was to wait and watch what happened.

I soon found out that curry was not all that Indian people ate. They ate a diverse range of foods, just like the good ole boys in Covington, even if there range of foods was different than the one I knew. Sri and I were never close, but we had more than a passing familiarity. I talked to her in class, asked her questions about India, and worked with her on assignments more than once. The markers of difference faded away almost completely after a while. The only ones left were the brown of her skin and the slight accent in her voice.

The curry took a quick six hours (everything seems quick when you’re out doing things), and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the results. By that point, I had already tried curry, but its gentle burn wasn’t quite familiar on my tongue. And the coconut milk blended perfectly with all the other flavors. Tangy, spicy, comforting, and still unfamiliar. And it was the last quality that I loved maybe best of all.