Daag curry base: the most useful curry recipe you'll ever read (2024)

Just reading an Indian cookery book makes me want to go and have a lie-down. The yard-long list of ingredients, most of which need a special expedition to buy, the endless chopping and grinding, the blanching and toasting and tempering – it all feels a bit exhausting. No wonder most of us end up reaching for the takeaway menu when we fancy a curry.

Not all of us, though. According to Google, one of the top ten most searched-for recipes in the UK last year was Indian, something called a daag. I quizzed Indian and Pakistani friends, and they were sceptical. Was Google confusing food with a Pakistani television drama of the same name? (Daagh means stain, whether on your clothes or on your honour, in Urdu.)

But a browse through curry queen Camellia Panjabi’s book 50 Great Curries of India, which has sold more than a million copies, revealed that all those searches were on to something. “What many Indian working women do nowadays is to make fried onion, ginger, garlic, tomato and spice masala mixture (daag) to keep in the fridge for up to two weeks, or longer in the freezer,” she writes. “Whenever they want a curry they heat a few spoonfuls of it with some oil, add some meat, chicken, fish or vegetables… and with no further effort they have acurry.”

^{Daag spices, from top left, clockwise: garlic, cumin seeds, garam masala, paprika and turmeric (CHRIS WATT PHOTOGRAPHY)}

No further effort? I was hooked. So for more details, I headed up to Newcastle to visit Mumbai-born cook Maunika Gowardhan, the epitome of a busy working mother, running a successful website (maunikagowardhan.co.uk) and a catering business as well commuting to India to consult on a restaurant in New Delhi.

According to Maunika, a slender 37-year-old with a film-star smile and hair that Cheryl Fernandez-Versini would trade a tattoo for, there’s a simple reason that labour-intensive recipes are so common in Indian cuisine.

“Even middle-class Indian households will often have help in the kitchen, and recipes reflect that,” she told me as we sliced onions in her neat Newcastle kitchen. “So when I was growing up, my mother would cook, but the preparation, the making of pastes and chopping of vegetables, would have been done for her.”

^{Maunika Gowardhan plates up her finished chicken daag (CHRIS WATT PHOTOGRAPHY)}

In this country, it’s a very different story. So Maunika has evolved a repertoire that doesn’t demand staff or hours in the kitchen. Her soon-to-be-published book, Indian Kitchen, is full of ideas for making Indian cooking easier, such as puréeing ginger in bulk and freezing it in ice cube trays. Another top tip is to freeze bags of fresh spinach. “It’s much better than the ready frozen stuff, and instead of chopping it you can just squeeze the bag to crush the frozen leaves.”

“Daag,” Maunika explained as we sipped mugs of chai (spiced, milky Indian tea) and waited for the onions to fry to a deep brown, not a step that can be hurried, “is essentially a brown onion masala. Masala can mean dry spice mixtures and sauces, and here means a spice paste.”

We added spice and tomatoes to the meltingly soft onions and cooked them down to a tawny, savoury-smelling squelch, before adding chicken legs to braise in the thick gunk. This, Maunika explained, is a technique originated by the Sindhi community from the area that is now Pakistan, many of whom migrated to India after partition. They are famed for the Seyal cuisine, which involves slow cooking without adding water, so “the flavours are stronger and you get a thicker masala [sauce]”, explained Maunika. “It’s a practical measure. In hot weather, with no refrigerator, food cooked like this would keep a bit longer.”

Not that this was going to keep long. Maunika served up the curry, remarking: “It’s not such a bad thing if it sticks a little – that’s what lends the caramelly brown flavour.”

Curry in a hurry, no lying down required.

DAAG RECIPES

Indian Kitchen: The Secrets of Indian Home Cooking by Maunika Gowardhan is published by Hodder and Stoughton on May 7, price £19.99 and is available for pre-order at Telegraph Books

Great Curries of India by Camellia Panjabi is published by Kyle Books (£15.99 including DVD) and available at Telegraph Books