Does anyone like curry

Answer 1

Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term 'curry' has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread.

The earliest known recipe for meat in spicy sauce with bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text as discovered by the Sumerians, and dated around 1700 B.C., probably as an offering to the god Marduk.

The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word 'kari' meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveller in 1598 referring to a dish called 'Carriel'. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called 'caril'.

In her '50 Great Curries of India', Camellia Panjabi says the word today simply means 'gravy'. She also goes for the Tamil word 'kaari or kaaree' as the origin, but with some reservations, noting that in the north, where the English first landed in 1608 then 1612, a gravy dish is called 'khadi'.

Pat Chapman of Curry Club fame offers several possibilities:- 'karahi or karai(Hindi)' from the wok-shaped cooking dish, 'kari' from the Tamil or 'Turkuri' a seasonal sauce or stew.

The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj.

On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along.

In the time of Richard I there was a revolution in English cooking . In the better-off kitchens, cooks were regularly using ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, galingale, cubebs, coriander, cumin, cardamom and aniseed, resulting in highly spiced cooking very similar to India. They also had a 'powder fort', 'powder douce' and 'powder blanch'.

Then, in Richard II's reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called 'The Forme of Cury'. 'Cury' was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French 'cuire' - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine.

In the preface it says this "forme of cury was compiled of the chef maistes cokes of kyng Richard the Secunde kyng of nglond aftir the conquest; the which was accounted the best and ryallest vyand of alle csten ynges: and it was compiled by assent and avysement of maisters and phisik and of philosophie that dwellid in his court. First it techith a man to make commune pottages and commune meetis for howshold, as they shold be made, craftly and holsomly, Aftirward it techith for to make curious potages and meetes and sotiltees for alle maner of states, bothe hye and lowe. And the techyng of the forme of making of potages and of meetes, bothe flesh and of fissh, buth y sette here by noumbre and by ordre".

In his book 'Manners and Meals in Olden Times' (1868) F.J.Furnell noted a passage from a fifteenth centurytreatise against nouvelle cuisine :

'Cooks with peire newe conceytes,

choppynge, stampynge and gryndynge

Many new curies alle day pey ar contryvynge

and fyndynge

pat provotethe pe peple to perelles of passage prouz peyne soore pyndynge

and prouz nice excesse of such receytes of pe life to make a endynge.'

So when the English merchants landed at Surat in 1608 and 1612, then Calcutta 1633, Madras 1640 and Bombay 1668, the word 'cury' had been part of the English language for well over two hundred years. In fact, it was noted that the meal from Emperor Jahangir's kitchens of dumpukht fowl stewed in butter with spices, almond and raisins served to those merchants in 1612, was very similar to a recipe for English Chicken Pie in a popular cookery book of the time, 'The English Hus-wife' by Gevase Markham. Indeed many spices had been in Europe for hundreds of years by then, after the conquests of the Romans in 40AD and the taking of Al Andulus by the Moors in 711 AD, bringing to Europe the culinary treasures of the spice routes.

Many supporters of the Tamil word kari as the basis for curry, use the definition from the excellent Hobson-JobsonAnglo English Dictionary, first published in 1886. The book quotes a passage from the Mahavanso (c A.D. 477) which says "he partook of rice dressed in butter with its full accompaniment of curries." The important thing, however, is the note that this is Turnour's translation of the originalPali which used the word "supa" not the word curry. Indeed Hobson -Jobson even accepts that there is a possibility that "the kind of curry used by Europeans and Mohommedans is not of purely Indian origin, but has come down from the spiced cookery of medieval Europe and Western Asia."

Whatever the truth, 'curry' was rapidly adopted in Britain. In 1747 Hannah Glasse produced the first known recipe for modern 'currey' inGlasse's Art of Cookeryand by 1773 at least one London Coffee House had curry on the menu. In 1791 Stephana Malcom, the grandaughter of the Laird of Craig included a curry recipe she called Chicken Topperfield plus Currypowder, Chutnies and Mulligatawny soup as recorded in 'In The Lairds Kitchen, Three Hundred Years of Food in Scotland'.

Around the same time the word "consumer" began to appear which, conversely, was not originally an English word as one might think, but derived from 'Khansaman', the title of the house steward - the chief table servant and purchaser as well as provider of all food in Anglo-Indian households.

In 1780 the first commercial curry powder appeared and in 1846 its fame was assured when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a 'Poem to Curry' in his ' Kitchen Melodies'.

Answer 2

Curry is eaten by many people around the world. It is particularly popular in places such as Thailand, Burma, and India.