When people say “We’ve all been there”, very rarely have all of us actually been ‘there’.
It would be more accurate to say “Most of us (somewhere between 70% and 80% of us) have been to a similar place – not necessarily ‘there’, but a place very like or near ‘there'”.
Granted, this isn’t much comfort when you’ve locked yourself out of your flat or left your umbrella at home on a rainy day, but statistically it’s more accurate, and if you can’t take comfort in sound data practice then there is no hope for you in this cold world of numbers and sums.
But we’re not here to talk about numbers and sums, we’re here to talk about experiences. Enjoying a curry is a commonly shared experience; it’s a British institution. There’s a good chance you’ve had a curry while drunk, what with beer and spicy food making such excellent bedfellows, but what you’re about to see is not a commonly shared experience.
In fact, it’s something most of you will never have imagined in your wildest dreams.
While conducting some very important research into the habits of men who spend too much time fannying about on Twitter, I came across this tweet.
Yes, you are seeing that. That is a real, genuine tweet from a human person called Becky.
At first I laughed; well, who wouldn’t? We’re all in favour of fusion cooking, but just as Alien should never have met Predator, Frosties and curry were never supposed to share a plate.
I could see the logic, drunken though it may be: poppadoms are thin and crunchy, just like Frosties. They’re far too small to act as the scooping device that poppadoms are often employed as, but from a texture perspective, I could see what they might bring to the table.
But Frosties? Sugar frosted flakes of corn? With curry? Sugary, crunchy, breakfasty curry? No, Becky. This is madness.
And yet, Becky was so assured in her own creation. “I might be drunk but I am a drunken genius,” she said. Most of us (somewhere between 70% and 80% of us) are prone to bouts of drunken ‘genius’, but usually you wake up the next day and discover that shaving your arse was, in fact, a bad idea.
Curry and Frosties, though. Frosties and curry. The notion stuck with me. I had to find out. I had to go there.
So I got myself a curry…
Chicken Jalfrezi, £3.50 from Sainsbury’s. We can get into the oohs and ahhs, ifs and buts of whether a microwave jalfrezi counts as a real curry, or you can just fuck off.
For the purposes of this experiment, it was perfect, largely because I wasn’t willing to spend a tenner on a takeaway and potentially ruin it by adding Tony the Tiger’s crunchy little niblings. This may be a staggeringly influential piece of research one day, but at the time it was mainly just my lunch.
…and I added some Frosties.
You can see that, can’t you? Those are Frosties, sat next to a bowl of curry and rice. It felt wrong pouring them onto the rice. It looked wrong sat there. I felt like I’d flicked on the telly and found myself 65 minutes into David Cronenberg’s The Fly, with Jeff Goldblum partially transformed into a hideous neither-one-nor-the-other of flesh and pus, except Jeff Goldblum was made of Frosties and curry.
Was this going to be nice? It was hard to imagine that this was going to be nice.
I set up my fork and prepared for annihilation.
But who was to be annihilated? The curry and Frosties? Me? British culture as we know it? Only time and a few decisive crunches would tell.
In it goes…
In retrospect, that was too much of a forkful. The good thing about photography is that it can’t completely capture the inelegance of a man trying to stuff a fork piled high with curried chicken, rice and Frosties into his gob, so you’ll just have to use your imagination.
Or, and this is just an alternate theory, I didn’t really want anyone to see that picture.
I chewed, I tasted and I thought.
Curry, check. Rice, check. Frosties, check. All, for better or worse, present and accounted for. Now, the business of chewing – mastication, as it’s known in professional circles. You can tell from my face and clenched fist that I was bracing for the worst.
The upper molars met the lower and between them they chewed the unholy meeting of curry and cereal. I chewed and I chewed, I wondered and I pondered, and I swallowed.
Oh my lord.
…it was actually pretty good
I started to laugh. I couldn’t believe it. I had curry, rice and Frosties in my mouth and I wasn’t deeply disturbed; I wasn’t even grimacing. I was giggling like a hyena. It may be bad manners to laugh with a mouthful of curry, rice and Frosties, but I was so overwhelmed with relief and surprise that I had taken leave of proper etiquette.
You won’t believe me, but the combination really worked. As I guessed, the textural element worked perfectly – it was like a scattering of tiny poppadoms, little pockets of crunch playing counterpoint to the tender chicken and fluffy rice. But the sugary coating, that was the pleasant surprise.
Curry fans will know that a jalfrezi is a fairly spicy dish – it’s not blow-your-head off, shit-your-pants hot, but it has more than a jazzy little tingle about it. The sweetness of the Frosties cut through the heat magnificently, not taming but supporting the spice. I popped in a second forkful, then a third and fourth, each as delicious as the last. It was good, it was really bloody good.
But…
Oh god, what is happening?
As much as I enjoyed eating curry with Frosties, I don’t think I can ever eat curry with Frosties again. We make progress when we break down barriers and build bridges, but some bridges aren’t meant to be built. Some peaks aren’t meant to be scaled.
Though I wasn’t a pioneer (only Becky can lay claim to that title), there were times during that meal when I felt like one, but in reality I had stumbled into God’s laboratory. I was awestruck, meddling with things I didn’t understand and forces I couldn’t reckon with.
No amount of scientific analysis or molecular gastronomy can really explain why I enjoyed eating curry with Frosties, because when you eat curry with Frosties, you leave the world of reason behind. I enjoyed it, but I wasn’t ready. We are not ready. The world is not ready.
This must never get out.
Photos taken by Rich Cooper and Richie Driss.
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