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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Interesting!

I take issue with the common claim that 'curry' isn't a thing in a 'real' Indian restaurant. I did a quick survey online and could not find a single solitary Indian restaurant menu without curry on it. From the fanciest to the common takeout joint. There are even chains like 'Curry House'.

Let's tone down the virtue signaling in food reviews. It's silly. There are 150 languages in India; there are as many cuisines. To claim knowledge about the 'real Indian' food or culture is transparent nonsense.

On another slant, it's a rampant issue in YouTube videos where anybody with an Italian accent claim only they know how to make real Italian food. Learn a little history, folks.

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The point is that “curry” is a British generalization.

Indian restaurants were historically called curry houses as a pejorative.

India has many dishes that one might consider a curry, but we have no dish called curry. The only use of the word curry in restaurants is to appeal to British nationals (and anyone they spread their culture to).

It’s an artifact of colonialism.

I also don’t understand why you think it’s virtue signalling. If anything, your appeal to “150 languages in India” is virtue signalling because you’re trying to make a benevolent justification for a word whose history you don’t understand. Also rich that you say “learn a little history folks” when you yourself clearly didn’t learn it in this instance.

Now, there is a word “Kari” in several South Indian languages but it’s used to mean spicy sauce or “kadipoda” which means spice mix, both derived from “black” in reference to the use of black peppercorns. The generalization into “curry” was one of colonial misinterpretation.

https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/04/why-we-ca...

> Now, there is a word “Kari” in several South Indian languages but it’s used to mean spicy sauce or “kadipoda” which means spice mix, both derived from “black” in reference to the use of black peppercorns.

Is this the same word as "kara", black, in Turkic languages?

Apparently, speculatively, yes: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconstruction:Proto-Japonic/...

Also Japanese "kuro".

Yes Turkish and Sanskrit have a lot of shared words or similar ones due to various cultural sharing

> The only use of the word curry in restaurants is to appeal to British nationals (and anyone they spread their culture to).

So, the Curry Points that dot Hyderabad are artefacts of British colonialism?

> The generalization into “curry” was one of colonial misinterpretation.

Yeah, no. The Telugu kura which is obviously cognate with kari is used to mean, well curry. How about you tone down the misinterpretation and false generalization?

Agreed, and, using a word from one area of India might not be suited for applying to all of it.

That cross pollination of words is something the English language seems to do from time to time.

Every area of the Indian subcontinent was a rich area of its own languages, music, food and more.

For me north, South Indian cuisine and everything in the between is worth getting to know as and where it is.

Telugu Kari doesn’t mean curry in the sense that British people understand it. Please actually look up the history of what kari is.

The use of curry in Indian restaurants in Hyderabad are an artifact of colonialism. Hyderabad in particular caters a lot to foreign nationals due to the proliferation of the tech sector there.

Anyway What curry dishes are they serving there? “Hyderabadi chicken curry”? What is it called natively?

Probably just chicken something. Well said.

I assure you, if you ask for chicken curry in any restaurant in Hyderabad, they'll know exactly what you mean. They might not necessarily serve it though.

Of course they know it. They don’t exist in a vacuum.

That doesn’t mean the dish is “curry”.

Just like how many Indians will call it Butter Chicken Curry colloquially but the dish is Murgh Makhani.

> That doesn’t mean the dish is “curry”.

Is this supposed to be some metaphysical argument? The dish is literally chicken curry i.e. kodi kura.

The point is:

- curry is used in Britain (and any place they colonized) to refer to any and all spiced gravy, not just sauce.

- Kari in Tamil (widely considered to be the root of the word curry) refers to a dark, spiced sauce. It doesn’t mention it’s a gravy and it likely referred to a black peppercorn based sauce. It is simply an element of a dish like a bechamel. It is not a dish by itself.

- kodi kura is a specific preparation of chicken. Kura doesn’t mean curry, its closest English translation would be a stew. And even if it would be classified as a curry in England, it doesn’t change that it’s neither what they call curry or that other dishes that they call curry aren’t a form of kari in India.

Lastly, you take great pains to say that Hyderabad is culturally and politically independent from the British rule. So by that logic it wouldn’t even be a usable argument to say Curry is derived from those words

At the end of the day, the most well known etymology for curry is a mistranslation of the Tamil `Kari` where they mistook a single component of a dish to be the whole dish.

It was further perpetuated in the west as a stereotyped dish. Many Indians accept the word curry today because it was introduced into our zeitgeist but the concept of Curry as it is in the Uk has no foundation in actual Indian cuisine.

> Kura doesn’t mean curry, its closest English translation would be a stew

FFS, no! A dry stir fry is called a podi kura, with podi meaning dry. A stew like curry would be called a pulusu kura.

> Lastly, you take great pains to say that Hyderabad is culturally and politically independent from the British rule. So by that logic it wouldn’t even be a usable argument to say Curry is derived from those words.

Telugu speakers of Hyderabad State used the same word as their colinguists in the British ruled Madras Presidency. This would suggest the term predates the annexation of the Northern Circars by the British who could have then adopted it.

> At the end of the day, the most well known etymology for curry is a mistranslation of the Tamil `Kari` where they mistook a single component of a dish to be the whole dish.

At the end of the day, curry is a perfectly valid coinage and is cognate with kura and used to mean the exact same thing.

> It was further perpetuated in the west as a stereotyped dish. Many Indians accept the word curry today because it was introduced into our zeitgeist but the concept of Curry as it is in the Uk has no foundation in actual Indian cuisine.

Curry is quintessentially Indian. The fact that some Indian languages don't have an equivalent encompassing term doesn't change that.

Going for a curry in the racist 70s and 80s England is worth asking folks who lived through it how much it swept through mainstream society .

I’m not sure how you got that from what I said but sounds good.

> Telugu Kari doesn’t mean curry in the sense that British people understand it.

As a native Telugu speaker, I use kura in the same sense as the English curry to refer to a diverse class of dishes.

> look up the history

Here's some history: Hyderabad was never colonized by the British. My grandparents who grew up in Hyderabad State and didn't speak any English used kura in the same sense that I do.

> Hyderabad in particular caters a lot to foreign nationals due to the proliferation of the tech sector there.

You don't have the faintest idea of what you're talking about. The Curry Points I mentioned are little hole-in-the-wall takeaway places that you see in every other street corner. They are almost exclusively patronised by Telugus. Forget foreigners, even migrants from other states usually find the spice levels too high.

> Anyway What curry dishes are they serving there? “Hyderabadi chicken curry”? What is it called natively?

I haven't heard of a distinctive Hyderabadi variant but they obviously serve chiken curry which in Telugu would be called kodi kura. Google Maps is your friend: https://www.google.com/maps/search/curry+point/@17.5057149,7...

India was colonized. Whether they specifically colonized an area or not is irrelevant. Indian regions don’t exist in isolation.

Kari in telugu is not the same as curry. The colloquial use of it as such is an artifact of British rule. You dont exist in a bubble.

Kura is not the same as a generic curry. Not all things that are considered a “curry” are Kura or Kari

> Indian regions don’t exist in isolation.

Hyderabad existed as a politically and culturally separate entity. The ramifications of these historical distinctions play out in politics to this day. See Telangana statehood for an example.

> Kari in telugu

You keep bringing it up but to the best of my knowledge there's no kari in Telugu.

> The colloquial use of it as such is an artifact of British rule.

Do you have a source that isn't your ass?

> Kura is not the same as a generic curry.

Oh knowledgeable one, please tell me more.

> Hyderabad existed as a politically and culturally separate entity

The only culturally separate population I know of on earth anymore are the Sentinelese on the Andaman and Nicobar islands.

Hyderabad's name itself is Arabic+Persian, and compared to India overall, far more people speak English there. It was a regional capital of South Asia. Cosmopolitan places like that are always cultural crossroads. Practically everyone/everyplace is a mutt, culturally and biologically, the world over, except perhaps the Sentinelese.

Sorry I meant Tamil Not Telugu. But the point remains the same. Curry in the British sense is not curry in any Indian sense. Kari doesnt imply a specific gravy dish, it implies a spiced sauce component. Saying you want a curry dish is like saying you want a cream dish when you order murgh makhani. It’s incongruent and a conflation of modern colloquial use vs the actual dish. Just like not ever meat dish is a ragu in Italy.

And Hyderabad may have been politically separate. It’s not culturally separate. Unless you purposefully deny any migration.

Hyderabad is not some unique snowflake among the Indian diaspora.

> Kari doesnt imply a specific gravy dish, it implies a spiced sauce component

So a bit like how us Brits use "curry" then...

No because there’s no dish that’s a curry. It’s a component of a dish. Furthermore it’s a very specific component historically pepper based.

This is the problem. You borrowed a word that you don’t understand the depth of and are now arguing that it should be used in your way when people raise what it actually means. It’s a co-opting of a cultures word and cuisines.

There is no dish that’s “curry”. The British generalized it to be all spiced thick stews.

Would you call an eggs Benedict “a hollandaise”? Or roast potato’s as “chips”? No because there’s specifics to a dish that you afford it because you’re familiar with it. Calling them curries and expecting that to be the actual term is ignorance.

I'm not arguing it should be used in a particular way. On the contrary, I am specifically not insisting that the Telugu speaker and his grandparents' less specific use of kura is incorrect simply because it resembles the mostly more recent (and seldom pejorative, FWIW) use of its British English cognate.

"Chips" is an interesting example to bring up, because the word means completely different preparations of potatoes in different parts of the Anglosphere...

Kodi kura was the exact example that popped into my mind. Kura is a cognate/derivative from some Dravidian root similar to Kari/Curry (I believe Malayalam and Tamil use the kari form)

“Curry” isn’t a British generalization.

“tarkari” literally means a cooked vegetable dish in several north and eastern Indian languages.

Curry comes from the Tamil word (கறி kaṟi). The curry we have today is a mix of different influences - Ancient Indian (mustard, fennel, cumin, black pepper, curry leaves), Mughal, and Portuguese (Chilli pepper, tomato). There are subtle but important difference but they all share some similarities - especially the spices. Although curry powder (turmeric, coriander, fenugreek, cinnamon, cumin, black pepper, ginger, and cardamom) - those are every day spices in South India which was where most spices where exported from, historically. And we use that exact combination to this day.

I see it frequently in British cooking shows - trying to lay claim for curry. I'm sure curry has evolved like with any cuisine. But it's absolute bonkers that even James May seems to think that curry originated in Britain. Now, that's some fine poppycock.

I was making the claim that if you went to a restaurant in India, you wouldn't normally find any menu item called "curry", because curry is a genre of foods and not one single item in Indian cuisine.

Saying "No self-respecting restaurant in India" may be a better way of putting it.

That makes sense. Thank you.

This might be a language barrier issue, but I have never seen an Indian-style restaurant advertise a dish as "curry" in any country I've visited. Even in Japan (I live in Tokyo and have several インド料理 shops nearby), even if the shop itself has カレー in the name, the menu will say what each thing is (keema, sagh paneer, etc).

Imagine sitting down and opening a menu and seeing something labelled "soup" or "sandwich"!

I only know of one Indian restaurant locally here (Ireland) that has a "house curry" listed, but the rest of the menu is as you describe it.

In that case isn't "house curry" similar to "soup of the day"?

It's been a while since I've eaten there, so I can't remember if it's that, or something along the lines of their own signature recipe.

I would guess it's an original recipe (with no traditional name) and doesn't change daily.

North Indian dishes like da saag I keens might be evolving to care less to use it. But I’d bet that’s not just North Indian Christine. Restaurant opened by todays emigrating Indians are more aware of the choices than 30-50 years ago. It was a very different world.

If you went to a restaurant in Italy, would you find any item called pasta?

It is a fair claim.

The word rarely exists on its own.

It has roots in some Indian languages, but is not pervasive like it is today across all Indian cuisines.

Part of this is interesting to learn the stories of the early Indians who left India either as indentured servants which turned out to be an updated form of slavery, or emigrating as labourers from north India (and other areas) and how those migrations played out across the colonized world.

Sorry, I should have stayed quiet. I'd been scrolling through videos all trumpeting their only true recipe for whatever, and was sensitized.

Supposedly curry comes from the tamil word (transliterated as) "kaRi" which may be related to black pepper (native to India) to spice things up. In all Indian languages the color black has a very similar name (in Gujarati Kāḷī (feminine) or kāḷo (masculine) etc. -- also the goddess Kāli -- the one who is black or death!). More generally associated with something burnt (blackened). Anyway, a spicy sauce would be kaRi. In restaurants in South India you may find various dishes named curry (such as kozhi curry or kozhi kari). But when most everything is spicy, why even say that? Indians would rather know what is in a recipe than how it tastes! [Lot of speculation here: perhaps some knowledgeable Tamil will correct this without getting all upset!]

I should also point out "curry leaves" -- not sure if there is a connection with curry. They are not spicy but are put in many Indian dishes to give them a certain flavor.

To add to your point on curry leaves:

> Curry leaf” comes from the Tamil word “karu-vep-ilai” (‘black neem leaf’), leaves of the sweet neem plant Murraya koenigii

Thanks! In Gujarati we call it "meettho limdo" or sweet neem. It is dark green but not black (except when left in the 'frig for a few days or on the plant when it is sick!).

There’s some possible history further back in our languages where kala might have meant darker not just black.

Similarly the etymology of Krishna (the deity) is both considered “dark” or “black” depending on whom you ask.

I suspect it may be a case where our languages at the time didn’t need to delineate between black and a dark colour. Tone/shade was a relative unlike hue.

Telugu is karivepaaku. Same stuff.

Handy field reference guide:

- Is it possible Indian restaurants like other cuisine were packaged for a non-Indian audience as much as an Indian audience?

- Too many people faint at the sight of having to read and pronounce an Indian name, how might it go with something that isn’t short like naan, cha? Even with naan (which means bread), bread is added on to hear people say bread bread. Cha/chai is tea, and Indians live to hear people say tea tea.

- In this way curry might be a common word added to dishes.

- Next time, at an Indian restaurant, see if you can over hear any Indian guests who exclude the word curry from their sentence when ordering.

- Maybe it’s worth asking Indian mothers if the word curry was used by them.

- The etymology of curry is readily available. At most it’s a style of cooking (like bbq).

- There’s actually over 500 languages in India, but they might have been all the same to the British, so let’s just call it all a curry.

The only dish I can think is kadhi which is made with cooked yogurt. It’s not spelled or pronounced like curry.

I hope that helps with the offence :)

Well on the italian note calling 'curry' 'a thing' is like calling 'pasta sauce' 'a thing'. Like sure in a very vague sense but if you went into a restaurant and it had "Noodles with pasta sauce" as a dish it would (I hope) make you pause at least.

I mean there is no dish that is curry similar to how sandwich isn't a good. Sandwiches are a class of food with very disparate things being called sandwiches. Same with curries. The existence of sandwich shops does not mean there is a singular dish called sandwich

Curry loosely translates to gravy. Without a more specific term describing the type of curry it's a little pointless.

Ever go to an Italian restaurant and say "I ll have the pasta"?

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