At the Oriental Club are served, or used to be served, really excellent curries, assorted; for as there be more ways than one of killing a cat, so are there more curries than one. The French turn out a horrible mixture, with parsley and mushrooms in it, which they call _kari_; it is called by a still worse name on the Boulevards, and the children of our lively neighbours are frequently threatened with it by their nurses. On the whole, the East Indian method is the best; and the most philanthropic curry I ever tasted was one which my own _Khitmughar_ had just prepared, with infinite pains, for his own consumption. The poor heathen had prospected a feast, as it was one of his numerous "big days"; so, despising the homely _dhal_, on the which, with a plate of rice and a modicum of rancid butter, he was wont to sustain existence, he had manufactured a savoury mess of pottage, the looks of which gratified me. So, at the risk of starting another Mutiny, it was ordained that the slave should serve the refection at the table of the "protector of the poor." And a _pukkha_ curry it was, too. Another dish of native manufacture with which the writer became acquainted was a _Parsee Curry_. The eminent firm of Jehangeer on one occasion presented a petition to the commanding-officer that they might be allowed to supply a special curry to the mess one guest-night. The request was probably made as an inducement to some of the young officers to pay a little on account of their "owings" to the firm; but it is to be feared that no special vote of thanks followed the sampling of that special curry. It was a curry! I tasted it for a week (as the Frenchman did the soup of Swindon); and the Parsee _chef_ must have upset the entire contents of the spice-box into it. I never felt more like murder than when the hotel cook in Manchester put nutmeg in the oyster sauce; but after that curry, the strangling of the entire firm of Jehangeer would, in our cantonments, at all events, have been brought in "justifiable homicide." "Oyster sauce" recalls a quaint _simile_ I once heard a bookmaker make use of. He was talking of one of his aristocratic debtors, whom he described as sure to pay up, if you could only get hold of him. "But mark you," continued the layer of odds, "he's just about as easy to get hold of as _the oyster in the sauce_, at one of our moonicipal banquets!" But return we to our coriander seeds. There is absolutely no reason why the frugal housewife in this country should not make her own curry powder from day to day, as it may be required. Here is an average Indian recipe; but it must be remembered that in the gorgeous East tastes vary as much as elsewhere, and that Bengal, Bombay, Madras (including Burmah), Ceylon, and the Straits Settlements, have all different methods of preparing a curry.