Fish Curry Recipe

Looking at this fish curry,evokes the memories back in the day . Specially tuna, it had to be my favorite fish. Because it resembled meat,sturdy and held it’s shape. I despised fish of all sorts except this. I hated the tiny long bones fearing that it would get stuck in my throat and the fish smell . I’ve always been a meat girl. Chicken was very rare those days, you get to eat it only on special occasions. It was always beef and fish on rotation.

Beef was a different story altogether. It’s always unpredictable.If you’re lucky you get a good chunk of beef from the butcher and it gets cooked until the meat fell off the bones. That is if mom had plenty of time. More often, mom whizzes through the cooking and the meat is chewy. Except the curry,whatever the texture of the beef is,the curry always ended up tasting delicious.

Fish is easy to cook. And I love that about tuna. It’s easy to preserve too. We make a dish called Ambul Tiyal or Sour fish, a dry dish that can be kept about three months sans refrigeration. Maldive fish, which we grind and use it in most of the curries and condiments is none other than dried tuna.

I was glad to find the tuna chunks here in Ireland like the ones back in Sri Lanka. It’s a pinkish red meat. It cooks beautifully and within minutes. I have always eaten this as a spicy red curry.
Since I could take the heat no more,I’ve made a coriander and black pepper fish curry with tamarind for tanginess.Tamarind is used in most Asian cooking as a souring agent. I’ve found the tamarind concentrate here in the ethnic Indian food shop.A bit goes a long way.

You can use Salmon ,Cod and Monkfish to make this dish apart from Tuna. It’s best served with warm rice and myriad of mild vegetable curries as we Lankan like to eat. The curry is great to mop up crusty bread and the leftovers can be heated the next day.