Curry Cult

CURRY CULT The best place to familiarize yourself with all the culinary traditions of the Indian Ocean is the French island Réunion. It helps that the names of the dishes are easy to remember.

Text

M a r i a S I D E L N I K O VA

Translation

“W

hat do you have as an entrée?” (fr. appetizer, Ed.) a Frenchman from the Continent routinely addresses a dawdling laid-back Creole, the owner of a lodge in the Cirque de Cilaos. “Curry!

Every meal is curry here!” she replies in her chirping language. The expression on the Frenchman’s face shows confusion at first, but eventually he enjoys curry as a first, second and third course alongside a homemade punch.

Inhabitants of Réunion Island have a million ways of cooking this meal of Indian origin. The food cult on Réunion, one of France’s overseas territories situated east of Madagascar, is just as strong as on the Continent. However, local cooking lacks the refinement of French cuisine. It is a marvelous mix of Chinese, Indian and EastAfrican cuisines seasoned with a bit of theЧFrench culinary tradition.

Such splendid culinary blends appear as a result of ethnic diversity: Réunion

Shamil GARAEV

is populated with immigrants from every shore washed by the Indian Ocean.

An Island of Three Continents Réunion along with Madagascar, Mauritius and Rodrigues form the Mascarenhas Archipelago. All four islands are volcanic in origin and remained uninhabited for a long time before being severely affected by the intrusion of Europeans. Réunion was one of the first to meet such a fate, although historians are undecided on the exact date. In the X—XII centuries Arab merchants, who travelled between Madagascar and Africa, spoke about a fire-breathing mountain in the middle of the ocean which they always avoided.

The Portuguese while searching for a sea route to India couldn’t pass up the opportunity to stop at Réunion.

In the beginning of the XVIth century

the Portuguese navigator Pedro Mascarenhas, who gave his name to the archipelago, first staked out a claim to Mauritius and later to Réunion.

When the Portuguese returned home, the memory of this earthly paradise haunted them and what is heaven without food? So the next time they anchored there, they introduced goats and pigs to the island and thus on their following stopover apart from adjusting the masts, they enjoyed a good meal on the beautiful shores of this uninhabited land.

Réunion has been called many things. The Arabs named the island Dina Morgabin (Western Island); the Portuguese dubbed it Santa Apolónia; the English used names such as The English Forest and Pearl Island; the French addressed it as Île Bourbon after the House of Bourbon, then Réunion, and later Île Bonaparte, before switching back to Île Bourbon whereupon the continuous naming came to an end. In 1642 Louis XIII ordered that the 2,5 thousand square kilometers of Réunion land, free at the time, be considered part of the newly established French East India Company — a creation of the French colonial policy, beautifully described in the king’s edict as “a commercial enterprise in India, useful to every Frenchman.”

Madagascar was the first to prove its usefulness. The French had barely finished building the fort when a mutiny broke out. The king gave Monsieur du Pranis a choice to either leave the rebel soldiers to the Malagasy, the indigenous people of Madagascar, who were sure to tear them to pieces, or send them to the scaffold. The latter acted humanely and banished them to an uninhabited island. The exiled soldiers had no choice but to become farmers and thank the Portuguese who had introduced goats to the island. Réunion welcomed its first settlers and it didn’t take long for the French to notice the land’s extreme fertility. But they were not prepared c. 137

V

UNIVERSUM Travel

January 2014 | I M P E R I A L № 0 1

to toil over it. Soon slaves were transported to the island and the plan for the next couple of centuries was set in motion: white people enjoyed themselves while black people labored.

In the XVIIth century 200,000 Africans cultivated coffee plantations and developed the territories in the island’s central region, where three beautiful cirques formed after the collapse of the shield volcano Piton des Neiges. After the abolition of slavery in 1848 Réunion faced a work force void. At first the French continued to import slaves from Somalia, Madagascar and Comoros via the well-trodden sea route, but riots continuously broke out on the island.

This made the colonizers turn their gazes in the opposite direction, across the ocean and offer work to Indians, Chinese, Vietnamese and even Australian Aborigines. All these peoples, known collectively today as Creoles, brought their own cultures, religions, traditions and cuisines to Réunion.

Reunion-style Curry The main dish on any Creole table is curry. It is part of every meal; in fact, it usually is the entire meal. Curry is served in every Creole restaurant, and the higher up the mountains you go and stray from the beaten path, the more limited the choice on the menu. In Réunion, unlike in Mauritus, they don’t actually add the spice of the same name to their curry. Roots of curcuma widely known as “national saffron” and which grow on the island are used instead. Curry is made by frying pieces of meat, fish or chicken and mixing in vegetables and spices — anything you like or have at your disposal. Garlic, onion, thyme, ginger and saffron are indispensible. Still it is not about what you add, but how you cook it. True curry requires a big iron cauldron, and if the restaurant you’re at doesn’t have such a stove and pot, you should leave without a second thought.

Curry is served with natural, unsalted boiled rice. This tradition comes from c. 138

the Malagasy, for whom rice is their main source of nutrition.

The people of Réunion try to diversify their menu as much as possible, therefore curry and rice are usually surrounded by an army of small grain dishes — a mix of beans (lentils, haricot beans, peas and dried vegetables) dressed with piquant rougaille sauce.

But be careful not to turn curry into a mishmash: Creoles observe a separate nutrition diet and mixing all ingredients is considered bad taste. This might well be the island’s most important rule of restaurant etiquette.

Simple Specialties To understand how the locals eat, head to the beach or mountains on the weekend.

The entire island turns into one big picnic area, with not an empty table in sight and all tables covered with dishes overpouring with food. Besides curry there are bouchons — Réunion raviolis with pork, enveloped in rice dough and cooked in steam, much like Chinese dim sum; samosa — triangular pies of Indian origin stuffed with minced meat and spices; smoked foods (boucané), colonial by origin passed down from a time when meat and fish were smoked for longer storage. In addition there is rougaille sauce with small dried shrimp (chevaquine) accompanied by another characteristic Réunion appetizer, zourites — little octopuses usually cooked with ragout in red wine and spices.

And, of course, macatias — slices of small sweet flatbread which resemble the French brioche. Once eaten instead

V

UNIVERSUM Travel

January 2014 | I M P E R I A L № 0 1

of bread by slaves from Île Bourbon island, now they are usually enjoyed for breakfast or dessert.

Desserts Interestingly enough, the island’s cuisine doesn’t have such a thing as dessert in its traditional French sense. But it would be criminal to ask for something sweet when there’s so much fruit around, wouldn’t it?

It is important to come to Réunion at the right time. Victoria pineapples, the best in the world, are on sale from November to December. During this time “babies” are sold everywhere, one euro a piece.

Litchi is another favourite fruit here.

It also ripens at the end of the year and one tree can give up to 200 kilos of these reddish “cones”. No Christmas table can do without them. Litchis on Réunion are like tangerines in Russia. Passion fruit is yet another of Reunion’s characteristic fruits. With a soft juicy interior filled with numerous seeds which crunch

HOW DODO DISAPPEARED ON RÉUNION “You want to eat? Go to the mountains!” — the colonizers’ message to slaves was succinct. And off they went to hunt anything they could find, leaving the towns with the local animals to the ruling class.

At the time the island was a natural habitat for Réunion ibis, nicknamed “loner” for its isolated way of life. It was beautiful, big and tame, with wings so short and a body mass so great that not only could it not fly, but it couldn’t run fast either. In other words, it was ideal prey. “Men slaughtered it with sticks and stones. Ten people were enough to kill it, and it gave game enough to feed 40,” — states a log book entry.

The last attempts to find the “loner” were in 1800 and even then the Creole elders couldn’t remember seeing one. Slaves, apparently not without help from the French, ate the entire population. Today only the most famous local beer’s label reminds one of this extinct species. It is called Bourbon, but people prefer Dodo in memory of the disappeared bird.

The same fate awaited tortoises. They were taken on board because they could live without eating for three months. It was like having fresh meat readily at your disposal without needing a refrigerator.

c. 140

when bitten into and a bit sourish on the tongue, this fruit ripens in MarchApril and might well be reason enough to become an islander for a couple of months a year.

A Delicacy under Threat of Extinction Connoisseurs will probably turn their noses up: rice and meat — you call this cuisine? Réunion has something special for them: Les Bichiques, a delicious food that can be compared with black caviar. It is in fact baby goby fish, a tiny elongated fish with a life cycle that remains a mystery. They are limnetic, but for most of the year they remain in the sea, where they also spawn. The baby fish, however, return to river mouths in September and stay until December coming out only in moonlight. When fishermen call for the nets to be cast, then bichiques is up. However, only a handful of local men have such fishing licenses since these tiny fish are under threat of extinction. The police prosecute poachers, but this doesn’t stop them especially on Christmas Eve. At this time of the year market stalls reek from miles away of bichiques, one kilo costing 50 euros. How do they cook it?

You guessed it: they use it for curry.

Easter is the time for another local delicacy — wasp larvae. This is a treat fewer have the pleasure to savor, though.

Firstly, they are not easy to find with local smugglers often bringing larvae from Madagascar. Secondly, it is a pricy dish, with one kilo reaching up to 200 euros.

They are eaten either simply fried with salt or, obviously, cooked as curry.

A salad made of African palm oil remains the most available and popular traditional meal. The Creoles use only the local breed. The core of a young tree’s trunk, the softest and most juicy part, is used for the salad. It is hard to compare its taste to any other vegetable.

For a vegetarian this salad tastes like lamb to those who enjoy eating meat.

It may sound strange, but the most important ingredient of any festivity on Réunion is the people. Their kindness and openness are known as far as the Continent. They will help you, if you are in trouble; they will offer you food, if you are hungry. Try to imagine a Frenchman in a restaurant somewhere in Paris coming up to you for no obvious reason and out of mere kindness pouring a handful of little octopuses on your plate, saying that you can’t leave without trying them! Can you? Well, Creoles are free of continental prejudices and it is nothing but a pleasure to share a meal with these overseas Frenchmen.