British home cookery has a really undeserved poor reputation; I’m sure most of us have whole generations of wonderful cooks, mums, grannies, distant great-grandmas, with secret recipes, family recipes, traditional and wholesome and tasty and economical recipes. British cooking has always been spiced and flavoured with herbs, and fruits preserved and used in unusual ways, and vegetables dug from the garden, scrubbed and straight fresh into the pot.
The Spillers Party Cook Book was published, I think, in the early fifties, is full of recipes which try and make the most of ingredients, cooking them in interesting and different ways. British people have always had a taste for spicy foods, right back to using mustard and horseradish to add a little heat, before chillies had arrived from across the Atlantic.
This recipe for a curry must have seemed quite exotic then – using bananas in savoury dishes must have been quite exciting at a time when the fruit was only just back in the shops after wartime rationing. The recipe might seem quaint to us, that a sauce thickened with cornflour has the other ingredients added to it… the prawns are cooked for half an hour – they must have been like little tasteless nuggets of leather after that! The heat comes from ginger and paprika, and the sweetness of the bananas is enhanced with sugar… not to the taste of many people these days!
Lois Elsden 