SpiceLines

What is curry exactly? This is one of those prickly issues that foodies love to debate, even as we are stuffing our mouths with, say, the most delectable fish curry from Goa, practically wallowing in the irresistible flavors of fresh coconut, sour tamarind and fiery kashmiri chilies.

In A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, K. T. Achaya defines “curry” as an “Indo-Anglian” construct “which has come to symbolize Indian food for the westerner.” Derived from kari, the Tamil word for black pepper, it originally described any spicy dish that accompanied South Indian food, then came to embrace “a liquid broth, a thicker stewed preparation, or even a spiced dry dish.” Achaya dryly adds that one Eliza Fay served curry and rice “as a matter of course” at her Calcutta table in 1780, “as did thousands of other colonials living everywhere in India.”

The mystery of curry is more fully revealed in Lizzie Collingham’s new book, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. This densely written history of Indian cuisine invites the reader down so many intriguing byways that one sometimes loses sight of the main idea: that the evolution of Indian cuisine was spurred by hordes of invaders—the Mughals who originated in Central Asia, then the Portuguese and the British—who fused their own culinary traditions with those of the Subcontinent, producing entirely new dishes such as, yes, curry.

As Collingham explains, Indians would never have called their own food curry. “The idea of curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India’s food culture….[Indian] servants would have served the British with dishes that they called, for example, rogan josh, dopiaza or quarama. But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry.”

The English got the word “curry”, she says, from the Portuguese who had arrived in India in 1498 with Vasco da Gama. They used the terms “caril” or “carree” to describe broths “made with Butter, the Pulp of Indian Nuts…and all sorts of Spices, particularly Cardamoms and Ginger…besides herbs, fruits and a thousand other condiments [that they]…poured in good quantity upon…boyl’d Rice.” The Portuguese had in turn drawn these words from three South Indian languages: karil in Kannadan and Malayalam, and kari in Tamil, both meaning spices as well as sautéed vegetables and meat. The British generically applied the word curry to “any spicy dish with a thick sauce or gravy in any part of India.”

Collingham traces in gruesome detail the devolution of curry from a spicy pan-Indian dish with many regional variations into a noxious all-purpose turmeric-heavy powder manufactured in England for returning civil servants who pined for the lost pleasures of the Anglo-Indian table. Fortunately, in both England and America we are enjoying a surge in restaurants serving regional Indian cooking, so we can taste the real (but still evolving) thing.

See K.T. Achaya, A Historical Dictionary of Indian Food, Oxford University Press, 1998, and Lizzie Collingham, Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, Oxford University Press, 2006, both at www.amazon.com.