Malaysian Fish Head Curry Recipe

In the early 1900s, my paternal grandfather sailed from Tamil Nadu to then-Malaya as a 12-year-old orphan. He was a part of one of many immigration waves from India, which mostly consisted of men and boys from the southern Indian regions of Tamil Nadu and Kerala who were brought by British colonizers to Malaya as indentured laborers to work on rubber plantations in an abusive and exploitative system that existed alongside and then eventually replaced enslavement. Beyond my grandfather’s brave and harsh journey, I don’t know much about him, though I’m told he opened what was possibly the first Indian restaurant in the sleepy port town of Pontian, Johor. My dad grew up eating many meals at his father’s restaurant, which trickled down to my own childhood, in which there was always curry on our dining table.

Malaysian-style curry, typically a brilliant red-orange gravy with different vegetables and proteins, tends to be on the spicier side. The most famous version is fish head curry, which likely began as a poor man’s meal but has since risen in popularity to become one of the most expensive items on Indian restaurant menus. For many, sharing a decadent fish head curry as part of a banana leaf–rice meal with family and friends is still a special treat.

Picture this: A large tureen filled with steaming curry is brought to the table, in which several large fish heads are submerged, surrounded by bobbing vegetables. Popular fish varieties in restaurants are whitefish like snapper and seabass, though I personally prefer oily fish like large mackerel and salmon, as they stand up well to the spice of the curry sauce. Diners spoon the curry sauce onto their plates of rice, and communally pick at the fish heads over the course of the meal. Many will call dibs on their favorite parts: the little scallops of cheek meat, the tender flesh in the crevices of the collar, the gooey eyeballs saturated with spice. When the fish heads are seemingly picked clean, some folks will place what remains of the skull on their plate, and tunnel through every hollow and crevice, triumphant whenever they discover a piece of flesh that someone else overlooked. It’s a feast, one best enjoyed with a large group of loved ones on a weekend afternoon.

While the curry sauce is what contributes the bulk of the flavor, most restaurants don’t make their own spice blend for the curry; many instead opt to use ready-made packets of ground spices labeled “fish curry powder,” or order their own custom mixes to be ground at local spice mills. While the use of pre-ground spice mixes is convenient, they tend to lean quite heavily on chile powder, which gives the curries their vivid reddish-orange color. I personally love heat, but too much chile powder makes the curry rather one-note. On top of that, I prefer to grind my own spices, which, because they are fresh and more potent, produce an overall hotter blend without having to go heavy on the chile powder. While this does result in a curry with a less vibrant color, it makes for more balanced flavors all around, which is a tradeoff I'm happy to make.

A technique often used when preparing Malaysian curries—dubbed the “reverse tadka” by Serious Eats contributor Nik Sharma—is to toast a selection of spices at the start of the cooking process. These spices remain whole, separate from the ones that are ground into a powder. For fish curries, the mix usually contains mustard seeds, cumin seeds, fennel seeds, fenugreek seeds, and sometimes nigella seeds. It's a combination that can also be bought ready-made at shops, often called “panch phoron.”

It's a technique I use in this recipe, in which eggplant are first fried in oil until golden, then the whole spices are bloomed in the hot oil before diced onion and a paste of garlic and ginger and fried until sweet and fragrant. The curry is built on top of that with tomato, tamarind, coconut milk, curry leaves, and a homemade mix of ground spices. After that the fish heads go in with okra and the fried eggplant and simmered until the fish is cooked and the vegetables are tender.

The soft textures of the fish and vegetables married with the boldness of the curry and the occasional crunch of whole spice make for a sensorial, lick-your-fingers meal that you won’t soon forget.