Malabar-Coast Shrimp Ruby

Lime, ginger & garlic, tomato-onion, curry leaf, mustard

from the kitchen

The Malabar Coast is the long strip of Kerala shoreline where the spice trade began, and where, for a couple of thousand years, everyone who arrived by boat left something behind in the cooking. Roman ships came for pepper. Arab traders came and stayed. The Portuguese turned up with chillies from the Americas, which makes the chilli a far more recent arrival in Indian food than most people assume.

The signature is not chilli

Coastal cooking along that stretch has a signature, and it is not chilli. It is mustard seed and curry leaf, dropped into hot oil until the seeds crack and the leaves go glassy and the whole kitchen smells like the coast. That is where this curry starts.

Shrimp comes next, with ginger, garlic, tomato and onion, and lime rather than tamarind to cut the richness. Shrimp is unforgiving — a minute too long and it turns to rubber — so it goes in late and comes out fast. This is not a dish that can be made in advance and held.

Kerala cooks the same shrimp half a dozen ways depending on which stretch of coast you are standing on — more coconut as you go south, more black pepper up in the hills, tamarind where the Tamil border blurs. This one sits at the sour-bright end of that range, which is the Malabar signature and the reason lime does the cutting here rather than cream doing the softening.

The one nobody can place

Curry leaf is the ingredient nobody can place afterwards. It is not a herb you can substitute for anything else, and a Malabar curry without it is simply a different curry.

What arrives is bright rather than heavy: a curry that tastes of the sea and the sourness rather than of cream. Order rice with it, and enough naan to justify going back for more of the sauce. Mum’s Lemon Daal is the bowl to put next to it, since lemon is doing there what the lime is doing here.

Dietary & spice

It carries shellfish and mustard seeds, and there is ghee in it, so it works for neither a shellfish allergy, a mustard allergy, nor a dairy-free table. Everything else about it is straightforward. The allergy menu lists every dish and what it carries.

Malabar-Coast Shrimp Ruby.