Kim and Curry

Sometimes books bring very unexpected things into your life.  As the summer unfolds and the garden produces our daily vegetables, I am fondly reminded of how Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim brought Indian cooking into mine.

Kim and Vegetable Curry

Although I was already a huge fan of Kipling’s The Jungle Books, I was an adult before I ever tried Kim.  What made me take the gamble was my fondness for recorded books.  As I was browsing the library shelves one day I decided to try Kim, which I had avoided for some time out of a child’s loyalty to my first love.  The reader was excellent – so talented that Jim later suggested we buy a copy for our private library – and the story was complicated, full of twists, and just plain marvelous.

Jim had heard Kim in fragments but never from end to end, so he asked if we could take the tapes along on one of our forthcoming road trips.  Early in the book, when Kim begged vegetable curry and rice for himself and his new friend the Tibetan lama, Jim said:

“I don’t know why, but that sounds wonderful.  I’d like to try some sometime.”

We have a couple of Indian restaurants we enjoy, but for some reason the idea of simply going and ordering a dish of vegetable curry never crossed our minds.  Instead, we hunted through shelves of Indian cookbooks until we found one that we liked the look of.  By now it was summer, so we adapted the recipe in the book (which called for cauliflower, which neither of us care for cooked, though I’ll eat it raw) to use the surplus from our garden.

To a base of browned onions and oil saturated in powdered turmeric, coriander, chili, and cumin, we added zucchini, eggplant, peppers, and string beans.   Since we were using “wet” vegetables rather than the drier potatoes and cauliflower called for in the recipe, we cut the broth, adding just a few tablespoons of liquid so that the vegetables would not singe before they started producing their own broth.  The end result was both savory and spicy.

These days, we make some variation of this recipe every summer.  When we have more produce than we can use immediately, we cook up surplus and freeze it for the winter.  As good as the curry tastes in summer, it’s even better in winter when the spices warm the body from the inside out and the reminder of summer warms the soul.

We’ve also made other recipes from that book.  They’ve all been good, but nothing has pleased us quite as much as that vegetable curry, maybe because when we eat it, we join in spirit with Kim and the lama as they dine together in the shadow of Zam-Zammah outside the Wonder House in the city of Lahore.

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