Some Foods Are Manlier Than Others

I like a good curry. There are some very good curry restaurants in London, and I miss them here on my soggy and culinarily reduced island.

But, while I enjoy, as I say, a good old blowout with a curry, they, to borrow a phrase from middle England, don’t really like me very much. Yes, I pay for my curries twice over, as it were – once at the time of eating, and again the next day.

Anyway, my point is not to bore you with the workings of my innards, but to bore you instead with my theory on men and curries (which could possibly be generalized to men and hot or spicy food in general). You see, while I like curries and am quite aware of the travails that await me on overindulgence in them, I am still always tempted to go for slightly hot ones, rather than enjoy the taste but stay with the milder varieties. While I’m not gung-ho enough to challenge a phaal or even a vindaloo, I still like ones that will hurt my mouth a little and take some getting into before the flavour comes out. And I believe I’m not alone among men in this respect.

So why do men like hot curries so much? There are several possible explanations:

Firstly, it’s bravado. Men like to prove to women, to each other and to themselves that they can take a hot curry, painful though it may be, and even “enjoy” it. They might talk with relish of the discomfort it gives them, while eating and afterwards, and even decry the milder choices of their eating companions. Well, this is doubtless true of some men. The pissed Brit demanding the hottest thing on the menu is an old chestnut, but we’ve all seen, or even been, that man at some time or other. However, while this may take some of the blame for my madras, I think there are other contributory elements.

There’s the sensation itself. You don’t have to be a wild-eyed auto-thrasher to enjoy (just a little) the burning lips and mouth and the streaming eyes and nose that come with a few mouthfuls of one of these dishes. Indeed, some scientists have said that the reaction of pain receptors to hot curries leads to the release of endorphins in the body, with the natural high generated leading to withdrawal, cravings and a desire to move on to ever hotter versions. It’s certainly true that you can get a taste for heat, and it can be hard to go back. And I like the idea of a roghan josh as a gateway drug.

Lastly, there’s the taste. The thing about hot curries is to get a little bit accustomed to the heat, pain and discomfort. If you can get over the throbbing and smarting going on mid-face, you can reach a sort of plateau of calm, the “eye of the curricane,” as it were, in which the taste of all the spices and chillies comes through – and it’s really very nice, and somehow even enhanced by all the gustatory noise going on around it.

So, I think it’s a mixture of these three factors that goes to make up men’s liking for curry. True, only one of them seems to be at all reasonable, but at least they show that we’re not one-dimensional. Peculiar, yes, but not as simple as we first seem.

Contact the author here: thewhy@morningquickie.com