Curry Before Columbus

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

So no connection to "cury" then:

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

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

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

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"...

I keep my bottle of hing in another bottle.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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)."

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.

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).

"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?