My wife and I went out for a curry recently, and returned to a restaurant where the simple, basic, chicken curry is always superb.  Fancying something different, she started looking for a suitable lamb curry, but with only a couple of exceptions, all lamb curries were listed as being made with lamb tikka.  Hoping against hope, I asked the proprietor if the two exceptions were indeed made with “real” lamb rather than lamb tikka, and was not surprised to learn that the answer was “no”.  “Our beef curries are made with topside, and not pre-cooked in the tandoor” he said, but as neither of us fancied beef, and as king prawn was twice the price of chicken, we settled for a chicken curry and a chicken dhansak.  Both were superb (as always), but what a disappointment not to be able to get a single lamb curry made with lamb rather than with lamb tikka.
--
** Phil.

it also meant converting whatever units of measurement the 11th-century chefs were using into the metric system.

Now that is a surprise — I thought that Americans were inextricably wedded to measuring ingredients in cups (etc) and had no idea what a millilitre (sorry, Americans — milliliter) or gram was ...

Well, yes, it was certainly Japanese cuisine that I ate while I was there (but not Japanese curries ...) but please do make sure that if you eat fugu your chef possesses one of these !

Yet if he did not have such wealth, how could he afford to donate $3 billion to charity ?
--
** Phil.

Amazon, if you cannot locate a suitable Asian grocer nearby ...