The Lincs link: sausage and potato curry

My family’s arrival in rural Lincolnshire in 1972 was so out of the ordinary that it was written about in the local paper: “Winterton gives Asian family a warm welcome.”

Another one of my grandfather’s snap decisions had led them there. They had escaped from Uganda and flown into RAF Stansted. At the registration desk, the official asked my grandfather where he’d like to go and whether he’d like to go on the dole. “No, thank you: just tell me where I can get a job,” was his prompt reply. The registrar said that he’d heard the Scunthorpe Steel Works were looking for lorry drivers. It was a sliding doors moment; we could have gone anywhere, but we ended up in Lincolnshire, far away from the other Asians. He hung up his suit, got out his driving licence, put on some overalls and a pair of steel-toe-capped boots and went straight to work.

Mum was just 16 years old when the antelopes and tropical heat suddenly gave way to Top of the Pops and cold, wet Lincolnshire fields. Everything around her had changed. With both parents out at work, she started cooking dinner daily at home.

“At first, we ate a lot of cauliflower, cabbage, potatoes and peas,” she remembers. “And the odd Cornish pasty and fish and chips.”

Just a few months later, my father, also a Ugandan Gujarati refugee, who had known our family back in Uganda, heard of my mother’s whereabouts and came to visit. They fell in love and she was married at 18. They didn’t have much money, so they learned to be resourceful – not just to feed themselves, but also my sister and I, when we appeared on the scene just a few years later.

Mum would cook whatever she could get her hands on and that’s when the happy accidents started to happen: a magical alchemy of local Lincolnshire produce and Gujarati knowhow.

First came the curried baked beans and a “fallen pear” chutney using pears from the garden where mangoes could not be found. There was a brief foray into spiced and stir-fried haslet (a meatloaf made with pig offal), which didn’t last long. Then came the Lincolnshire sausage and potato curry – an instant classic in our family.

There couldn’t be a more apt dish to summarise our time in Lincolnshire. Potatoes grow everywhere up there. I grew up with a potato farm just behind my family home, and with gloriously smelly pig farms just down the road. Lincolnshire sausages are some of the most famous in England, typified by their deep sage flavour. In the curry recipe below, Indian spices just play footmen to these local ingredients.

As the years have passed, both Mum and I have become more creative in using seasonal produce alongside Indian spices. Local farmers and neighbours still regularly drop off excess produce from their farms and gardens, giving rise to all sorts of things: rhubarb kulfi, gooseberry chutney, Swiss chard saag, wild pheasant curry, rabbit biryani, runner-bean thoran and even Grimsby smoked-fish kedgeree. There is little that grows in Lincolnshire that has not been spiced by our hands.

When I was writing my cookbook, Made in India: Cooked in Britain, the sausage curry was the only thing Mum and I argued about. “You can’t leave it out of the book; you grew up eating it,” Mum said. “Besides,” she added, “it’s ’ek dum tasty.” (Very tasty.)

But I did leave it out, thinking it too weird and personal a dish to include, and I regretted it the moment the book was published. It was the one that got away and the one everyone who knows our family well asked about when they didn’t see it in there.

Which is why it is here, so I can finally share it. It is an odd reason for my family to be in the paper again 42 years after their first appearance, but it is in a way our thank you for the warm welcome the people of Lincolnshire gave my family all those years ago.

Lincolnshire sausage and potato curry

Not only a Sodha family classic but a cheap and (mostly) store cupboard-based recipe and one-pot dish, which makes for the perfect dinner on a cold winter’s night.

Serves 4
Groundnut or any cooking oil
8 Lincolnshire sausages
2 medium onions, thinly sliced
3cm ginger, grated
1 green finger chilli, finely chopped
5 garlic cloves, crushed
400g baby new potatoes (around 10)
350ml tomato passata
1⅓ tsp ground cumin
1⅓ tsp ground coriander
½ tsp chilli powder
½ tsp turmeric
½ tsp salt (or to taste)
Coriander, chopped, to garnish (optional)

1 Heat a drizzle of oil in a wide-bottomed and lidded pan. When hot, add the sausages and fry until they’re nice and brown all over. Take them out of the pan and leave them to rest on one side.

2 Add 2 tbsp oil to the pan and add the onions. Fry for 10 minutes or until soft and brown before adding the ginger, garlic and green chilli. Fry for a minute then add the potatoes.

3 Stir the potatoes and onions, add 2 tbsp water and pop the lid on. Cook for 5 minutes then add the passata. Keep the lid off and cook for a further 5 minutes, then add the spices and salt and cook for a further 5 minutes

4 Put the sausages back in and add a little water if the sauce is looking a bit dry, then cook for a final five minutes. Check that the potatoes are cooked through.

5 Serve with finely chopped coriander, rice or chapatis.

Meera Sodha is the author of Made in India, Cooked in Britain (Fig Tree)