Striking A Chord Or Four

I'm not sure why I first made pulusu, a tamarind-based curry/stew from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh. I think I was looking for something else (culinarily), came across a recipe for egg pulusu, and decided to give it a try. I got lucky: what I tried, on a whim, had an incomparable combination of flavors. To say it struck a chord with me would be an understatement. I became a pulusu convert, determined to learn to cook at least some of its many variations. 

Chance encounters occasionally take off like that. This dish, though, seems to have an effect on many people around here. Every time I've cooked pulusu for people who haven't tried it before, they've fallen for it as strongly and immediately as I did. Of course I don't know what I'm doing; I learned to cook it by vacuuming--sucking up any and all information I could find on it. I was vacuuming in a vacuum, effectively. At the time, I didn't know anyone who could tell me if I was preparing pulusu correctly, or even what the dish is supposed to taste like.

Chef Sanjay Thumma's explanation helped me to understand pulusu as a base to which one adds different ingredients (eggs or okra or taro or fish or eggplant or bottle gourd or potatoes, for example). I still don't know what I'm doing, but I believe it's a bit like Pachelbel's Canon in D.

Do you like this piece? Does it get stuck in your head? Pachelbel's Canon draws a strong response from most listeners. Many fall in love with it, even the first time they hear it, even if they're not accustomed to hearing western classical music. Even if they don't like western classical music. The piece triggers deep emotions. It's the base--in this case, a ground base of eight notes that repeat throughout.

As Rob Paravonian laments, the ground base in Pachelbel's Canon in D causes some to hate the piece, mostly because they grow bored with its simplicity and repetition. But he and The Axis of Awesome point out something else: this is the base for success. Something about the progression of sound speaks to people, not only in Pachelbel's Canon in D, but also in many, many other places. Master these chords and you'll write a hit song, claim the members of Axis of Awesome in another performance.

It's worth noting that the hit songs use four chords, not necessarily the eight-note ground base. That gives me a great deal of hope. I still don't know if I'm making pulusu correctly, and occasionally my quasi-obsession with "real" things* makes me doubt my efforts. But if I take the four-chord-hit-song-from-eight-note-ground-base as an example, I only need to get about 50% of this dish right for it to be fabulous. That should strike a chord with perfectionists everywhere.

Thanks to my friend Pamela for photos of chili peppers and potatoes

 

*note: not a real obsession