Curry
Curry is a dish with a spicy sauce or dry flavouring, initially in Indian cuisine, then modified by interchange with the Portuguese, followed by the British, and eventually thoroughly internationalised. Many curries are found in the cuisines of countries in Southeast Asia and East Asia.
In medieval India, proto-curries were flavoured with mild spices such as asafoetida, cardamom, coriander, cumin, and ginger, with the limited heat of black pepper. A definite step in the creation of modern curry was the arrival in India of spicy hot chili peppers, along with other ingredients such as tomatoes and potatoes, part of the Columbian exchange of plants between the Old World and the New World. The Mughal empire brought new subtly-spiced dishes, especially to the north of India. During the British Raj, Anglo-Indian cuisine developed, leading to Hannah Glasse's 18th century recipe for "currey the India way" in England. Curry was then spread in the 19th century by indentured Indian sugar workers to the Caribbean, and by British traders to Japan. Further exchanges around the world made curry a fully international dish.
Many types of curry exist in different countries. In Southeast Asia, curry often contains a spice paste and coconut milk. In India, the spices are fried in oil or ghee to create a paste; this may be combined with a water-based broth, or sometimes with milk or coconut milk. In China and Korea, curries are based on a commercial curry powder. Curry restaurants outside their native countries often adapt their cuisine to suit local tastes; for instance, Thai restaurants in the West sell red, yellow, and green curries with chili peppers of those colours, often combined with additional spices of the same colours. In Britain, curry is a popular dish with some types adopted from India, others modified or wholly invented, as with chicken tikka masala, created by British Indian restaurants in the 20th century.
Etymology
The English word "curry" is derived from the Dravidian language family, possibly by way of Dutch carrijl, Portuguese caris or caril, or some combination of these. The Dravidian source may be Tamil கறி kaṟi,, or a mingled borrowing from multiple Dravidian languages. Other Dravidian languages, namely Malayalam, Middle Kannada, Kodava, and Telugu have similar words.Kaṟi is described in a 17th-century Portuguese cookbook, based on trade with Tamil merchants along the Coromandel Coast of southeast India, becoming known as a "spice blend... called kari podi or curry powder". The first appearance in its anglicised form was in Hannah Glasse's 1747 book The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy.
The term "curry" is not derived from the name of the curry tree, although some curries do include curry leaves among many other spices. The cookery writer Pat Chapman noted the similarity of the words Karahi or Kadai, an Indian cooking dish shaped like a wok, without giving evidence. "Curry" is not related to the word cury in The Forme of Cury, a 1390s English cookbook; that term comes from the Middle French word cuire, meaning 'to cook'.
Cultural exchanges
Ancient spice trade in Asia
By 1500 BCE, seafaring merchants from Austronesian communities were already trading spices across the ocean. They sailed between South Asia and East Asia, especially the ports along southeastern India and Sri Lanka, creating some of the world's earliest maritime trade networks. Archaeological discoveries at Mohenjo-daro show that people were using mortar and pestle to grind spices as early as 2600 BCE. They pounded cumin, fennel, garlic, ginger, mustard, black peppercorns, saffron, sesame seed, tamarind pods, and turmeric to create spicy flavourings for their food, which included meat, fish, grains, pulses, and fruits. Black pepper is native to the Indian subcontinent and Southeast Asia and has been known to Indian cooking since at least 2000 BCE. The three basic ingredients of the spicy stew were ginger, garlic, and turmeric. Using starch grain analysis, archaeologists identified the residue of these spices in both skeletons and pottery shards from excavations in India, finding that turmeric and ginger were present, in what have been called "proto-curries". Sauces in India before Columbus could contain black pepper or long pepper to provide a little heat, but not chili, so they were not spicy hot by modern standards.Medieval Indian proto-curries
Before Christopher Columbus, Indian dishes were sometimes spicy but they were never hot like many modern curries, as chili peppers were absent, along with tomatoes, potatoes, bell peppers and squashes. The proto-curries of medieval pre-Columbian India were diverse but not much like modern international curries. Sambar, for example, was a dish of pigeon peas or lentils, flavoured with onions and mild spices. Among the key spices used in the period was asafoetida, a foul-smelling gum from plants of the genus Ferula. Despite its smell, it adds a fine-tasting meaty flavour when it is fried in oil.Chavundaraya II's 11th century Lokopakara makes use of asafoetida, cumin, curry tree leaves, and mustard to flavour a dal.
Spices named in the 12th century Mānasollāsa from the Western Chalukya Empire of South India include coriander, cumin, asafoetida, salt, and black pepper.
The 15th century Ni'matnāmah Naṣir al-Dīn Shāhī from the Malwa Sultanate of Northern India describes flavouring vegetables with asafoetida and sesame seeds fried in ghee, with lime juice and salt.
Early modern trade
The establishment of the Mughal Empire, in the early 16th century, brought some new and subtly spiced dishes, especially in the north. The Indo-Persian Mughal cuisine of the emperor Akbar, as described in the Ain-i-Akbari, could cook aubergines with asafoetida, cardamom, cloves, coriander, ginger, lime juice, onions, and pepper. The cuisine established dishes like biryani in India, derived from Persian pilau rice and the Persian habit of marinading meat in yoghurt, combined with Indian-style use of spices.Another influence was the establishment of the Portuguese trading centre in Goa in 1510, resulting in the introduction of chili peppers, tomatoes and potatoes to India from the Americas, as a byproduct of the Columbian Exchange. The food culture scholar Lizzie Collingham suggests that the Portuguese in Goa heard and adopted words adopted into a local language from the Dravidian words from South India, becoming caril or carree as transcribed by British travellers of the time. This eventually led to the modern meaning of "curry" as a dish, often spiced, in a sauce or gravy. In 1598, an English translation of a Dutch book about travel in the East Indies mentioned a "somewhat sour" broth called Carriel, eaten with rice. The later Dutch word karie was used in the Dutch East Indies from the 19th century; many Indians had by then migrated to Southeast Asia.
British influence
Curry was introduced to English cuisine from Anglo-Indian cooking in the 17th century, as spicy sauces were added to plain boiled and cooked meats. That cuisine was created in the British Raj when British wives or memsahibs instructed Indian cooks on the food they wanted, transforming many dishes in the process. Further, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when there were few British women in India, British men often lived with Indian mistresses, acquiring the local customs, language, and food. Curry was first served in coffee houses in Britain from 1809.Indian cooks in the 19th century prepared curries for their British masters simplified and adjusted to Anglo-Indian taste. For instance, a quarama from Lucknow contained ghee, yoghurt, cream, crushed almonds, cloves, cardamom, and saffron; whereas an 1869 Anglo-Indian quorema or korma, "different in substance as well as name", had no cream, almonds, or saffron, but it added the then-standard British curry spices, namely coriander, ginger, and black peppercorns. Curry, initially understood as "an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts", had become "a dish in its own right, created for the British in India". Collingham describes the resulting Anglo-Indian cuisine as "eclectic", "pan-Indian", "lacking sophistication", embodying a "passion for garnishes", and forming a "coherent repertoire"; but it was eaten only by the British. Collingham writes that "The idea of a curry is, in fact, a concept that the Europeans imposed on India's food culture. Indians referred to their different dishes by specific names... But the British lumped all these together under the heading of curry."
Elsewhere in the 19th century, curry was carried to the Caribbean by Indian indentured workers in the British sugar industry.
Globalisation
Since the mid-20th century, curries of many national styles have become popular far from their origins, and increasingly become part of international fusion cuisine. Alan Davidson writes that curry's worldwide extension is a result of the Indian diaspora and globalisation, starting within the British Empire, and followed by economic migrants who brought Indian cuisine to many countries. In 1886, 咖喱 appeared among the Chinese in Singapore. Malay Chinese people then most likely brought curry to China.In India, spices are always freshly prepared for use in curries. Derived from such mixtures, curry powder is a ready-prepared spice blend first sold by Indian merchants to European colonial traders. This was commercially available from the late 18th century, with brands such as Crosse & Blackwell and Sharwood's persisting to the present. Curry powder became a standard item in Anglo-Indian cuisine. British traders introduced the powder to Meiji-era Japan, in the mid-19th century, where it was used to make Japanese curry, known as カレー,.