This salmon curry is so simple it’ll blow your mind. The recipe is from a cookbook, South Sea Island Recipes, and was organized by the Fijian Girl Guides Association and the recipes were sent, to quote, “by the members and friends of the Girl Guides Association, Fiji. It does not aim at being a representative book of cookery, but an aid to the housewives in the South Sea Islands.” This cookbook is what I guess could be considered something of a family heirloom, coming from my Dad’s side of the family. Since it’s a cookbook of recipes compiled from several people, the measurements aren’t uniform: some recipes are volume, using cups and spoons, others give ingredients in weight, and others still use a combination of volume and weight. The recipes are told simply and there aren’t any pictures.
I learned how to make this curry in the early days of when I was learning how to cook. It was also, I remember, the first recipe that I chopped the onion for. (I had previously let my Mum do that, because I didn’t want to get the gas from the onion in my eyes – but, as it turns out, weirdly enough, I’m nearly immune to it. Everyone who knows me and knows this fact calls me lucky.) This cookbook was also the first that freaked me out about ingredients – there’s a recipe in there somewhere that calls for lady fingers and in my childish mind I mistakenly assumed them for human fingers. It took several explanations from different members of my family to realize that the lady fingers in question were the biscuit-y/cake-y kind.
Anyway, on to the recipe. I’m doing this recipe step-by-step with photos and if you want the shorter version, without the pictures, you’ll find it at the end of this post. First, our ingredients:
