OK, so it’s a tradition, every Friday lunchtime in the Japanese Navy – curry.
Despite its south Asian origins, it’s no exaggeration to describe curry as Japan’s de facto national dish: a soupy, mild version beloved of schoolchildren and office workers, and generations of SDF personnel for whom kaigun kare – or navy curry – is a source of fierce pride as well as sustenance.
It’s deffo via us English. Deffo. But this, I wonder:
As Japan expanded its influence in Asia in the late 1800s, large numbers of soldiers fell ill or died from beriberi, a vitamin B1 deficiency linked to their diet, which largely comprised plain white rice.
The solution came in the form of curry powder thought to have been introduced by Anglo-Indian officers in the Royal Navy who were among the first westerners to come into contact with Japan after Commodore Perry’s “black ships” forced it to end centuries of sakoku “locked country” isolation in the 1850s.
Curry powder, it turned out, contained enough vitamin B1 to keep soldiers and sailors healthy. Beriberi cases plummeted, and military personnel quickly developed a taste for anglicised curry and rice, made with meat and vegetables and a flour-thickened sauce that was less likely to splash around in rough seas.
I knew about the beri-beri and polished white rice. But curry powder contains enough? Rilly? Or is it whatever else is put in with it?
Yeah. It’s not the curry powder which has a tiny, tiny amount of thiamine. It’s the fact that they made curry with whatever meat and vegetables they could find on top of the rice with the curry sauce acting as a binder.
Thank you. I’d never heard of that one!!
Wut Dan Souter said….
*BIG* Difference between “no vitamins” and “There’s some vitamins left after being cooked to death”….
“Anglo-Indian” used to refer to British people who lived in India. Then it became used to mean people of mixed British and Indian descent. Now I have to guess which meaning is intended.
If there’s a link to the Guardian article I’m not seeing it. Here it is.
It amuses me more than somewhat that it’s written by Justin McCurry.
I am reminded of the World at War episode “Banzai !” About the Jap conquest of SE Asia.
There was a soldier on there who explained that in the jungle they would watch what the monkeys ate and could probably eat the same things. Above all catch a snake or a big lizard and it would make a nice curry.
I think what is going on here (in culinary rather than nutritional terms) is that Japanese cuisine is pretty much entirely devoid of spices. Specific “seasoning” elements are provided for by fermented stuff, largely soybeans or dried fish, seaweed, and an inexhaustible variety of fermented/dried plant foods (tsukemono). Japanese seasoning is salt and umami, not spices (sole exception I can think of, wasabi, and most wasabi isn’t wasabi these days, even in Japan).
Kare-raisu functions as an innovative counterpoint. Japan mostly doesn’t use a single spice, the idea of mixing 6 spices into the same sauce is bizarre. So it made its way into the Japanese repertoire the same way CTM did in the Yookay.
They use a fair bit of chilli. The main difference from most other cuisines, as pointed out to me by a Jap Michelin-starred chef, is that Japan has a water-based cuisine, the aim being to infuse water with umami. Hence dashi. Very little oil is used except in tempura, which is itself a Portuguese import. So, traditionally, they lack the calorific input from oil, which is one reason why they’re little buggers.
Japanese curry is Vesta curry. Indistinguishable.
When I was there, I noticed that teenage boys were about the same size as their western counterparts. They eat a lot more meat these days and are catching up accordingly.