The Williams Food Class

In 2020, I began teaching an Indian food, blogging and photography class at Willliams College, Massachusetts. At each session, students prepared a protein, lentil, vegetable, and bread or rice dish. We concluded the class by sitting around a table, talking and eating all the delicious food prepared.

The class included a Jackson Heights restaurant tour and we observed two chef’s – from Drunken Munkey and Rahi – demonstrate their cooking skills. Below are some of my student’s blog posts.  

As I stand before the dutch oven on the stovetop I witness culinary puberty before my own eyes. Meet Curry, the angsty teen of the cooking world. 

As far as food goes curry is an international superstar. Its name reaches every corner of the globe and it is as much of a brand as it is a staple of Indian cuisine. Curry belongs in the same bracket as Coca-cola, McDonalds and Michael Jordan as far as international recognition is concerned. In fact the duration and notoriety of the curry craze has far exceeded the heights of the jump-man. For centuries the humble dish has been throwing down slam dunks across the culinary world.

First encountered by the Portuguese in the late 15th century, the spice took on its colloquial name which vaguely translates to a number of meanings including spiced sauce, biting and to blacken. The lack of direct translation is an apt description for the flavor of the spice itself. It adds depth and excitement to a dish yet individual components cannot seem to be distinguished from the symphony it creates. The arrival of the British in the seventeenth century coincided with curry’s global proliferation. Curry became a  trade staple and appeared in nearly every British cookbook in the 1800s. It spread to Japan where it nourished soldiers in battle and to Berlin joints that nourished famished college students at 2am. Curry is a global superstar built to run with the best of them. However, cooking it provides the chef with a strikingly different experience.Over the course of 40 minutes curry more closely resembles a quarrelsome teen than Dwayne “the rock” Johnson. This was my experience while cooking a coconut shrimp curry this past Wednesday. I first blitzed chopped onions, ginger and red chili in a blender and then added it to two pots containing tempered mustard seeds, fenugreek seeds and curry leaves. Each pot contained a different protein, the first being shrimp and the second tofu. Over the course of the next 40 minutes the dish underwent drastic changes in flavor profile that resembled the stages of adolescence. At first the mixture tasted raw and bitter, much like the rush of hormones and first signs of acne on the face of a thirteen year old.

The early adolescent stage of the Coconut Shrimp Curry

Fifteen minutes later the sauce developed more depth, with notes of chili lighting up the corners of my mouth. At this stage of adolescence the curry’s voice may have dropped an octave and the curry began to retort to its parents. Thirty minutes in the bitterness has faded and the umami of the shrimp began to marble the sauce, the curry has started to develop a sense of self. 40 minutes have gone by and coconut milk is added to the dish. Umami, acidity and fat all work in perfect harmony, the curry has discovered its identity.

The curry reaches early adulthood

The result is delectable. Bright citrusy notes compliment the meaty undertones of the shrimp. Fresh chapati mops up the leftovers until the dish is wiped clean. The change of flavor profile in just forty minutes is remarkable. In a short period of time the dish has transformed from an angsty 13 year old to a mature 22 year old cooking for themselves. Such is the secret to curry’s global superstardom.

Matthew Peacock is a junior at Williams College double majoring in History and Chinese. Matthew is a member of the Cross Country and track teams and sings in the  Springstreeters, one of the college’s many a cappella groups. Matthew currently lives in New Jersey but he grew up in the Netherlands, the UK and Switzerland, sampling many cuisines along the way.