Many years ago, a British Expatriate curry lover / cook living on Bougainville Island got his best friend, a Canadian volunteer , interested in eating and cooking his own curries. They would regularly prepare curry diners and talk long into the night about spices and methods, and the Expatriate would, when in his cups, tell of his quest to get the true BIR smell/taste to his Indian cooking. His friend was an adept pupil, and was soon producing excellent curries of his own, and so it came about that one night the Expatriate was invited to the Canadians modest abode for a curry diner. As soon as he entered the house he could smell the BIR aroma, and on commenting that the curries smelt good, was offered a pre-dinner taste from the 3 karahis containing the nights dishes. Eureka !! One of the dishes [ might have been the chicken or maybe the lamb] had it; the smell, The Taste. It was spot on, absolutely the genuine article, and this 10,000 mile away from the good old UK. This was cause for celebration and, more to the point, a round of questions as to how the dish had been prepared. And the answer? The Canadian pointed to his kitchen table, covered in spice jars and all the other ?essential? ingredients for a good curry and was forced to admit that he had not taken particular notice and that he really was not sure which ingredients had been added to which dish, and thus was unable to enlighten the expatriate further.

And thus the secret was found and lost in New Guinea back in 1986.

I know, as I was the expat, and I never forgave my friend for not taking more notice of what he was doing in the kitchen that evening, because I have never been able to reproduce a similar result in a further 20 years of trying, but I know is shows one thing, that there is no magic, special ingredient used to achieve the BIT Taste, as we only had access to the usual spices one finds in any supermarket!

 Let the quest continue.