Curry Before Columbus

https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-columbus/

by Thevet • 6 years ago

82 67 6 years ago

contingentmagazine.org

basicplus2• 6 years ago

Curry is curry due to it containing tumeric, and tumeric is native to India.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmeric

diroussel• 6 years ago

Ginger and turmeric look very similar. It seems that ginger came from south-east Asia. https://www.motherearthliving.com/natural-health/know-your-s...

Interesting that it was not mentioned in the older recipes in the article.

AmericanChopper3• 6 years ago

You may as well say curry is curry because it has cumin in it, and cumin is native to India. Curry is really just a word made up by non-Indians to describe spicy gravy, or depending on who you ask, it can be used to describe any sufficiently spiced food. If you google curry potatoes, you’ll find plenty of recipes. If you google jeera aloo (which literally just translates to cumin potato) you’ll find plenty of very similar recipes. You can also find plenty of recipes for Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian... curries, and the only thing they have in common with Indian curries is use of spice and a gravy textured sauce, but using completely different spice bases and cooking techniques.

newyankee• 6 years ago

yes, i think it is not used so much in other Asian cuisines

esperent• 6 years ago

Not so. It's named after the Tamil word kari which means a dish eaten with rice and flavored with curry leaves (kari patta).

miguel_rdp• 6 years ago

An ad hominem side note: the author should try probiotics

555552• 6 years ago

They've had serious digestive problems since they were three years old and appear extremely well educated. They almost certainly have tried probiotics.

twoslide• 6 years ago

I've spent about 3 years in India, through a combination of work and family, and rarely see anything called "curry" on menus. Part of what this author seems to be getting at is that "curry" reflects a colonial viewpoint that homogenizes groups outsite the west. Thus, Indians, Thais and Japanese food has "curries" (even though these curries are very different from one another). In contrast Hungarians have "Goulash."

karatinversion• 6 years ago

Note though that the Japanese call their curry カレー ("karee"), and adopted it via the British, so it's not appropriate to call its name a colonial viewpoint.

arethuza• 6 years ago

The Japanese Navy apparently acquired a "curry" tradition from the British Royal Navy

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-curry-history

NB Jared Diamond's book Upheaval mentions how Japan reacted to a crisis in the 19th century by going out and seeking the best sources to copy - for naval matters that happened to be the Royal Navy and curry came with that:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upheaval:_How_Nations_Cope_wit...

leg100• 6 years ago

It's rather trite to go on about how the word "curry" is a crude term that glosses over the rich variety of regional cuisines between and within various countries. Anyone who wants to engage in oneupmanship know-it-all will stress its inauthenticity.

Yet it is a useful term - as someone else has mentioned - to refer to meat/veg in spicy gravy sauce associated with certain countries. Just because it's a word developed outside of India doesn't mean it isn't meaningful.

AmericanChopper3• 6 years ago

To say it’s colonial is a bit of a stretch. It’s simply a word chosen by a group of outsiders to categorize something they didn’t know much about.

The more relevant criticism of the word boils down to the facts that it doesn’t really mean anything to Indians, and that it’s meaning is so poorly defined that it barely means anything at all. The word can be used to refer to pretty much any Indian food, which is simply a poor categorization, and that use would wind up a lot of Indian people. The other use case is pretty much anything that has a spiced gravy. But a ragu uses spiced gravy as much as a butter chicken does, and most people wouldn’t call a ragu a curry. So it must be a spiced gravey with Asian ingredients, but a Japanese curry has more ingredients in common with a ragu than it does a saag paneer, also a lamb tagine dish uses a spiced gravy with Asian ingredients, and people wouldn’t call that a curry either.

Basically it’s a word that has no definition that would describe all of its different use cases.

DanBC3• 6 years ago

To say it’s colonial is a bit of a stretch. It’s simply a word chosen by a group of outsiders to categorize something they didn’t know much about.

A group of British outsiders who were in India because of the British Empire?

brownbat• 6 years ago

Hmm, what makes for a meaningful broad food category word?

Dumplings range from pierogies to xiaolongbao, sandwiches include monte cristos and cheesesteaks and fluffernutters, soup includes vichyssoise and miso and samgyetang.

Why do those words work, if they do?

Stepping sideways a bit... in New Delhi, menu names shift in a subtle way with the prominence of vegetarianism. In the UK or US, you might order a dish like "chicken with seasonal vegetables." In Delhi it's often reversed, they'll specify the exact meatless dish, Malai Kofta or Palak Paneer, but just say the side dish is "non-veg" without specifying whatever meat. That slight shift in emphasis really underscores the endless variety of things you can eat beyond meat, it makes plain how the generic Western conception of a meal through classic French courses can be incredibly narrow. However we ultimately come down on "curry," emphasizing meatless dishes seems like an example of food language that probably should have been heavily exported and hungrily adopted by the rest of the world. Even if you're not a vegetarian, treating meatless dishes as first-class citizens seems to add enormous diversity to any cuisine, and a ton more satisfaction in the eating.

555552• 6 years ago

idk. in Thai, the name for each curry is literally the color or flavor of the curry plus the word "curry", like how we (Europeans and Americans) mostly do with sandwiches and soups. This is self-inflicted but I hesitate to use that word as it overstates the graveness.

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 6 years ago

The Thai word is แกง kaeng, which is etymologically unrelated to English or Tamil, and encompasses a range of dishes varying from what we'd call curries (the famous red, green etc) to distinctly soup-like dishes like kaeng khae.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaeng_khae

beojan• 6 years ago

I'll just quote Wikipedia:

"Curry is an anglicised form of the Tamil word kaṟi meaning 'sauce' or 'relish for rice' that uses the leaves of the curry tree (Murraya koenigii)."

vardhanw• 6 years ago

Interesting to see the list of English words of Indian origin: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_words_of_India...

SllX• 6 years ago

Japanese-style curry is more or less a Meiji-era British import and wasn’t popular within Japan until the 1960s. For that matter the British weren’t one to homogenize groups; they made extensive investigations of the local cultures and power dynamics in new lands they explored, rejiggered the power structure to suit their preferences, standardized this totem pole and put themselves on top. Racist, but definitely not lazy about it.

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 6 years ago

Well, if you're talking about cultural homogenization, the curry-like thick stew you call "goulash" is actually pörkölt in Hungary. The original gulyas is a paprika-flavored soup, and it's considered an entirely different dish (eaten with a spoon instead of a fork etc).

pradn2• 6 years ago

"Curry" is used by Indians to describe freshly-made solid-ish vegetable/meat dishes that are always eaten with rice or flat breads like roti and parathas. They aren't eaten by themselves. They are also meant to be eaten hot. It's important that the "main event" is the carbs, with the curry accompanying them. This is both a broad and narrow definition. It's broad because you can make a curry out of any vegetable and any meat, with practically any spices. It's narrow because it has to solid-ish and be eaten with rice or flat breads. A soup like sambar or rasam mixed with rice isn't considered a curry, but it's not a soup per most people's standards either. A soup isn't a curry because it's not primarily eaten with rice or flat breads. A pickle isn't a curry because it might take months to be prepared; it's not meant to be eaten fresh. A mango chutney is not a curry because it's not meant to be eaten hot. (Note that the Indian definitions of "pickle" and "chutney" vary from the American/British usages. In India, a "pickle" is a preserved fruit/vegetable/meat in oil, chili powder, and other spices. A "chutney" is a freshly-made dish of diced fruits/veggies, often reduced to a paste with a blender.)

This is a sort of definition that's intuitive to Indians.

The problem Indians have with foreign usages of "curry" are, I think, with them not respecting this definition, and using the word to refer to pretty much all Indian food. "Going to get some curry" sounds like you don't care about even the basic differences in the cuisine you're eating. That all said, I understand that I'm undermining my own argument. It's rather subtle to tell a curry apart from another Indian dish.

Indian people eat plenty of things aside from rice/roti + curries. You have kebabs, biryanis (rice baked with meats), sandwiches (from Vada Pav street food to everything else), noodles (Indo-Chinese cuisine), a million buttery, saccharine sweets, unique breakfast foods like dosas and idlis, and so so much more. How can you have a country the size of India with at least 20 major cuisines and languages, in a country with influences from East Africa, Central Asia, Tibet, South East Asia, and Western Europe, without tremendous culinary diversity?

ggm• 6 years ago

... curry leaf gets a mention. So let's talk about curry leaf in the context of curry not being a 'thing' ... I have a curry leaf plant and we use it in our dal, and in rogan josh (a curry but also not a curry) and spinach and potato diahes

reactspa• 6 years ago

2 other potential sources of the word "curry"

- kadhai (Indian wok)

- Kari patta: a spicy leaf, staple in South Indian cuisine (and very tasty)

twic• 6 years ago

So no connection to "cury" then:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury

stevula• 6 years ago

According to Wiktionary, the existing Middle English word "cury" (= "cooking") may have influenced the word.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1

chin7an• 6 years ago

There's also kadhi[1], which interestingly is not the same dish as the Tamil 'kari'.

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kadhi

mrob• 6 years ago

Although I don't read medieval Persian, my guess is that "burned vegetable oil" would be better translated as "mustard oil heated to its smoke point". Mustard oil was (and still is) a common cooking oil in the region, and heating it to high temperature reduces the pungent taste.

patrickaljord2• 6 years ago

I've lived in Peru which also has a very spicy cuisine (many chilis come from the Andes). However, you'd be surprised at the amount of locals who confessed to me they didn't like food that is too spicy (they like it mildly spiced, or white people spiced as the article says) or spicy at all. It wouldn't surprise me if these two combined would represent 50% of the population. Could be the same in India.

vishnugupta• 6 years ago

There’s a tendency to conflate “spicy” flavor with “chilly” or “hot”. They are two orthogonal parameters, you could dial (up or down) them independent of each other. Most spices aren’t chilly, they add unique smell and flavor without burning the tongue.

Coming to India, almost every cuisine is spicy for sure. At least I don’t know of one that is not. Indians grow up immersed in spicy food and can’t live without it. And to be honest once your palette gets used to spicy flavor it’s hard to go back to bland food. Anecdotally I’ve heard many westerns complain about blandness of their food once they are used to Indian flavor.

Very few Indian cuisines dual up “hot” knob. Andhra Pradesh cuisine is an example of that. It’s almost at the limit of not killing the flavor.

So to summarize about India, we almost universally love spicy food. Some of us like it hot too

9nGQluzmnq3M3• 6 years ago

Hotness is relative though: they may not "dial it up" by Indian standards, but chili still makes its way into almost everything. A Russian colleague of mine visiting Delhi, not generally regarded as a hotbed of hotness, found virtually everything except dal makhani inedibly spicy -- because she was used to Russian food, where chilis traditionally don't feature at all.

India is also one of the few places I've been to where chilis are regularly used for breakfast dishes and even drinks like aam ka panna (spicy green mango juice).

phonypc5• 6 years ago

In my experience, "spicy" refers almost exclusively to chili pepper, with the sensation you get from black pepper, mustard or horseradish being edge cases.

If something is flavored with other spices, it's "spiced." e.g. "pumpkin (pie) spiced latte" or "jerk spiced."

patrickaljord2• 6 years ago

Yeah sorry, by spicy I meant hot. Every cuisine uses spices of some kind. As another commenter said, spicy usually means hot, while spiced means it has some kind of condiment in it such as salt and pepper or any other kind.

dfxm122• 6 years ago

There’s a tendency to conflate “spicy” flavor with “chilly” or “hot”.

I disagree. You're describing the difference between "spicy" (e.g., cayenne) and "warm spiced" or "spiced" (e.g., cumin). When a dish tastes of cumin, one doesn't call it "spicy", they use a different term.

pradn2• 6 years ago

I found the cuisine of Tamil Nadu near Madurai to not be very spicy. Perhaps that's because I'm used to Andhra food, with our explosive mango pickles.

sajithdilshan• 6 years ago

As Sri Lankans, "Curry" for us would be a dish made by mixing a variety of powdered spices with coconut milk and made into a sauce. If this sauce is cooked along with chicken it's called chicken curry and so on. But it has to be a dish made out of coconut milk and spices.

bogomipz3• 6 years ago

Indeed the versatile tomato could almost be seen historically as a calling card from the Portuguese. In Brazil one can eat Moquecas which are a spicy tomato-based stew which sometimes resemble the the spicy fish curries in the South of India. And in the US red chowder which is often inexplicably called "Manhattan chowder" is actually Rhode Island clam chowder, Rhode Island being a state with a large Portuguese population. And in Portugal itself Refogado is tomato sauce that forms the basis of many wonderful stews, soups and rice dishes there.

Finnucane• 6 years ago

Just before the lockdown I threw away some hing that had been on my spice rack for a long time. Way longer than one should keep spices. So I went to the local spice shop to stock up on some items, including a fresh jar of asefetida. I had forgotten how pungent it is when fresh. Now when I open the cabinet it hits me.

rob74• 6 years ago

Interesting! I have never heard of this particular spice before, although I may have already eaten it at an Indian restaurant. As to the "pungent" part, it's already in the name:

The English name is derived from asa, a latinised form of Persian azā, meaning "resin", and Latin foetidus meaning "smelling, fetid", which refers to its strong sulfurous odour

The German names are even less flattering:

Asant (Ferula assa-foetida), auch bekannt als Stinkasant oder Teufelsdreck - "stinking asant" or "devil's dirt"...

subpixel• 6 years ago

I only learned about it when attempting to cook Indian food via YouTube recipes. A game changer!

frandroid2• 6 years ago

I keep my bottle of hing in another bottle.

Curry Before Columbus

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