INDIAN FACT OF THE MONTH (December 2006): THE ORIGINS OF CURRY

Everybody in ourworld today knows what a curry is, or at least think they do. In the West the term ‘curry’ has come to mean any Indian dish with a gravy texture, whilst many from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they dont use often, 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 legend, but many experts 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’. 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.