Christian Chase Garner: JAPANESE BEEF CURRY

Christian Chase Garner
JAPANESE BEEF CURRY: A PANORAMIC

Step #1: Make the curry roux

Heat a pan to medium-low heat on your stovetop, or your induction burner, if you live in a twelve-by-forty-foot rectangular building that used to be your mother-in-law’s photography studio, the one that your family wired and plumbed, where your bed lies only feet from your kitchen. It is difficult to have peaceful rest when your wife works from the same spot she tries to dream in and when you don’t have a wall separating you from the dark walnut butcher block where you slice through portobello mushrooms. When you both leave and run into town, your wife always worries about how your family’s wiring might fault, like you do sometimes, and catch fire and swallow your three dogs whole like the gluttonous crumbling of a cave system. I understand the purpose of walls now, of distance, and the lack thereof.

Using equal parts butter and flour, first melt the butter in the pan, then spoon the flour over the bubbling fat. You’re lucky if it’s butter, though, because there are people out there who carry allergies to things like dairy and eggs, flaws that lay dormant, undiscovered for so, so long. Sometimes cicadas in North America will live up to seventeen years underground, feeding on the roots of the deciduous. Sometimes I feel as though I have still yet to unburrow. My partner, though, she mourned when she got her allergen results, as if she lost a child. Habits had already been formed. Branded, within. You cannot strip butter from murgh makhani, cheese from palak paneer, eggs from a woman who has cravings and scarring and who wishes only to someday stumble upon a peaceful afterlife, eating cream cheese frosting by the bowl in a house with many windows and many walls and every animal she’s ever owned by her side. Each time she passes a restaurant, hears the indistinct buzzing of life inside it, smells the clove, the coriander, the cardamom, it is a thousand tiny cuts. She will not tell you about them, but they are there.

Let your roux—pronounced roo, or rew—toast for about eight minutes. The color will shift from lemon chiffon to light caramel, and your house will smell of hazelnuts roasting. While you wait, do not wish ill upon the French for their silent x’s and their diphthonged vowels. Your brother-in-law may come in and ask what you are making. When you tell him, he might say something like, “are you making this Indian,” and then pull back the air as if he were an archer prepping a nocked arrow, “or this Indian,” and then press his index finger between his eyebrows as if it were a bindi—a colored dot that is nestled within the space of the sixth chakra, ajna, a sacred lotus of two indigo petals. It will make you uncomfortable, but do your best to remember where he came from, the rural Arkansas town, the smell of sugarcane and diesel, the crashing of cars, the youngness of it all. Bones, tendons, they’re like walls in their own right.

Before your roux finishes, whisk together your spice mix in a small bowl. This will include your “probably haves” (salt, cinnamon, nutmeg), your “might haves” (paprika, cumin, coriander), and your “off to Targets” (star anise, fenugreek seed, turmeric). Breathe. There are no purist eyes boring into your pan from the cabinet, ensuring that you don’t take out the star anise because it reminds you of chopped licorice whips, of your grandparents who have lived in a singular house for forty-eight years, a mausoleum for each relationship that they caught fire to, swallowed whole, until there was nothing left but smoky, charcoal bones. Mix your spice mix into the browned roux, stirring and letting it aerate the room for a minute or two, letting it cling to the kitchen walls. A thousand tiny cuts, over and over again. Pour a singular cup of water or chicken broth into the roux. Stir frequently until a thick paste forms. Dish into a bowl. Place it aside.

Step #2: Prep the ingredients

First, dice your potatoes into pleasantly small pieces. They will be easy. They’ll slide into the knife without resistance, letting you glide right through, as if they were men laying themselves against the headboards of their affairs, forgetting. The carrots, though, they are quite the opposite, shooting off like little tangerine bottle rockets, finding a way into the only space where they cannot ever be retrieved from again. In Japanese tradition, before one eats a meal they will place their hands together, bow, and say itadakimasu—a humbling acceptance of the food and its laborious preparation. From the earth that housed the plants in its womb, to the farmers who once had dreams of being accountants, hairstylists, to the mothers who birthed the butchers of the meat, those same mothers who wait in loveseats for their husbands, tarlike bags under their eyes, forgetting. So, while you try to calm the seething, volatile carrots, remember each step, where the life came from. That which has been lost and that which will be lost again.

Pro tip: The carrots will be easier to cut if you halve them then quarter them lengthwise, cutting down the long portion of the carrot. Then your quarters, when cut, will be able to peacefully rest in place. If you still cut vegetables like a Neanderthal who just found a sharp-edged rock for the first time, that is okay, because I do too sometimes. There is joy in not being what you are not.

Next, trim and cut the steak, ensuring a one-to-one ratio between protein and vegetables. Whatever cut of beef you can comfortably afford will work for this, as it will be slowly simmered, stripped of its sinewy texture, broken down without ever realizing. While other children were constructing treehouses with their fathers, my wife christened the graves of her makeshift cemetery that only grew with every buried dog, goat, goldfish, anything that made her afraid to leave it. I cut the meat in our family, the cold, marbled rawness of what once was, thinner and thinner yet. The green onions, though, for eventual garnish, she can chop those, because that stripping of life does not suffer, does not scar or mourn. It is your turn now. Chop the thin and earthy scallions into small, crisp rings. Set them aside, for another time.

Step #3: Build the dish

Heat a large, capable pot over medium heat, dousing with a small dose of your preferred oil. Wait until it shimmers, like the refracted, glistening air that settles above an autumn fire. Add yellow onion—that which needed to be prepped in the last step but will always be forgotten until this moment—and stir-fry until translucent. Add your protein and a little more salt. Continue stir-frying for two more minutes, a process originally used to dry grain back in the Han dynasty. That was back when you’d want to be a butcher, because then you were not bound to your master’s home. Women who had been widowed at that time still belonged to her husband’s family, even after his death. Add chopped garlic and tomato paste. Continue stir-frying for another two minutes. It was not until the Ming dynasty, almost twelve centuries later, when the wok was reshaped and used to stir-fry consumable food. Many still continued to boil and steam though, because they could not afford the necessary oil and fuel, could not revel outside of their barriers. Chinese architecture often had screened walls on either side of a building’s main entrance, constructed from the belief that evil things travel in straight lines, cannot round corners, like tracked trains that smell of diesel and sugarcane.

Add four cups of either water or chicken broth, your potatoes and carrots, and your curry roux, stirring until the roux has been incorporated into the liquid. Add two bay leaves, a bit of sugar to neutralize the acidity of the tomato, and black pepper. Simmer for at least an hour, possibly more if your vegetables need softening. Serve with warm basmati rice. Garnish with chopped green onion. Be proud of what you’ve made with your hands, the same ones that will eventually cradle a shovel and birth four rectangular walls of dirt—rootbound, like the marbling of ribeye or the spiderwebbed, indigo veins of a sleepless mother—to house the bones of every future animal that you will ever own. Remember that which has been lost and that which will be lost again. Itadakimasu.

Christian Chase Garner (he/him) is a writer and exceptionally amateur baker from Northwest Arkansas. His work has appeared in 3Elements Review, Blood Tree Literature, Stirring, Book of Matches, Exposition Review, and Sleet Magazine, among others.