Beef and Coconut Curry

For 25 years I lived beside a London common; every May, when the chestnut trees became covered in flowering candles, we knew the fair was about to arrive. It stayed for two weeks and my children begged to go almost every day. Someone in our family would invariably win a coconut and this mild curry originated with one of these. I would throw the coconut onto the stone-tiled floor of my kitchen to break it and then extract the flesh laboriously, grinding and pressing it through a sieve to mak