ROUSES_JulyAug2019_Magazine

Thai Coconut Curry with Shrimp, Coconut Red Curry and Green Curry with Tofu• recipes follow on page 57 • photo by Romney Caruso

“One of the most remarkable developments in the history of gastronomy has been the emergence of curry as an archetypal British dish. It used to be axiomatic to equate British food with blandness, but ‘going out for a curry’, the hotter the better, has become a way of life for many urban Britons,” writes Colleen Taylor Sen in her 2009 book, Curry: A Global History . Curry’s ubiquity has also often found its way into British pop culture, fromWilliam Thackeray’s 1847 novel Vanity Fair to the classic scene from the 2001 film Bridget Jones’s Diary , in which Renée Zellweger’s character groans over her mother’s extremely specific, signature British-Indian hybrid dish: “It all began on New Year’s Day, in my 32nd year of being single. Once again, I found myself on my own and going to my mother’s annual turkey curry buffet. Every year she tries to fix me up with some bushy-haired, middle-aged bore, and I feared this year would be no exception.” But outside of the largely Anglicized version of curries that the British — and by proxy, Americans — are most familiar with, how else has curry been incorporated into the culinary landscape across the world? Below are several sweepingly diverse ways in which curry has become “glocalized” — spanning oceans, centuries and deliciously diverse tastes. BUT FIRST: WHAT’S THE DEAL WITH CURRY POWDER? If we know that India doesn’t technically have any dishes that are called “curry,” per se, and we know that spice mixes in India are actually called “masalas” — then where on Earth did curry powder’s ubiquity come from? Once again, Europeans. “What you don’t need is curry powder,” writes America’s matriarch of Indian cuisine, Madhur Jaffrey, in her 1973 book, An Invitation to Indian Cooking . “To me the word ‘curry’ is as degrading to India’s

great cuisine as the term ‘chop suey’ was to China’s. ‘Curry’ is just a vague, inaccurate word which the world has picked up from the British, who, in turn, got it mistakenly from us. If ‘curry’ is an oversim- plified name for an ancient cuisine, then ‘curry powder’ attempts to oversimplify (and destroy) the cuisine itself.” Speaking of Indian food in any sort of all-encompassing, generalized way is a wildly inaccurate means of discussing a many-splendored country — with an equally varied and regionally specific cuisine — that’s so hulkingly large it’s actually a subcontinent. (Imagine the utter outrage that would ensue if someone insinuated that the cuisine of North Dakota and Louisiana were the same. Exactly.) The dishes that eventually would all be lumped under the heading “curry” are dishes with a rainbow of regional specificities and tastes. There’s doi maachi , a fish and yogurt curry specific to Bengal; kofta , a meatball curry; nalli korma , a lamb curry flavored with cardamom and saffron from the Lucknow region; and rogan josh , a curry consisting of mutton or lamb cooked in yogurt with ample red chiles, just to name a few. But when these spice-laden, complex dishes sparked a national craze (and craving) across England in the late 18th century, there was just one problem: Spices were wildly expensive, and the majority of Britons couldn’t afford to buy each ingredient on its own. In response, companies began creating spice mixes they dubbed “curry powders” which were marketed as a catchall spice blend for Indian cuisine. And while commercial curry powders — then and now — certainly don’t reflect the actual flavorings of India’s diverse, sauce-based regional dishes, they have lent themselves to helping create different versions of curry all their own across the world.

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