Spiced Chicken Curry Sauce

Chicken and a great many vegetables cooked down with curry powder, sazon and scotch bonnet, then thickened with a cornflour slurry. The source calls it South Asian; the ingredients say otherwise, and it is worth being straight about which. A genuine South Asian curry is built on whole spices bloomed in fat, on ginger and garlic paste, and on onions cooked down at length. This one uses curry powder, all-purpose seasoning, bouillon cubes and blended scotch bonnet, the standard vocabulary of West African and Caribbean home cooking, plus sazon, which is a Puerto Rican seasoning blend now sold everywhere. Sesame oil is the one genuinely East Asian note. What that amounts to is a diaspora dish that borrows the word curry rather than the tradition, and it is more interesting described accurately than mislabelled. The cabbage, carrots and three colours of bell pepper are not a South Asian habit either. They are what makes this closer to a Nigerian or Ghanaian fried pepper sauce, the kind ladled over rice on a weeknight. No country is claimed for it, and the flags note that its own description contradicts its ingredients. The source's closing line is garbled, it promises the streets of somewhere and then names no city, so it has not been carried across.