Curry doesn't come from one place, because "curry" was never the name of one dish. The word is usually traced to South India, most likely to the Tamil kari, a word for the spiced sauces and relishes eaten with rice. Portuguese traders picked it up in the sixteenth century, English speakers followed, and over the next three hundred years the British used it for almost any spiced, sauced dish from the subcontinent. Then the word went travelling on its own, to London coffee houses, Japanese navy galleys, Caribbean kitchens and, eventually, the takeaway menu on your fridge.
A word, not a recipe
Ask a cook in Chennai, Lucknow or Kolkata for "a curry" and you may get a polite, puzzled look. Indian cooking names its dishes precisely. A korma is braised gently, often with yoghurt, cream or ground nuts. A rogan josh is a Kashmiri lamb dish coloured deep red by mild chillies. Sambar is a southern stew of lentils and tamarind; a Bengali jhol is a light, brothy fish dish. What the rest of the world lumps together as curry is really hundreds of distinct dishes from a subcontinent with dozens of regional cuisines.
The cooking itself is ancient. Archaeologists studying residues from Indus Valley sites have reported traces of turmeric and ginger thousands of years old, and black pepper, native to India's south-west coast, was being shipped to Rome two thousand years ago. One thing, though, was missing from every one of those early dishes: chilli. Chillies are American plants, and they reached India only in the sixteenth century, most likely through Portuguese traders. Before then, the heat in a spiced dish came from black pepper, long pepper, mustard seed and ginger.
Portuguese sailors and a borrowed word
When Vasco da Gama's ships reached Calicut on the Malabar Coast in 1498, Europeans finally had a sea route to the spice coast, and the Portuguese soon made Goa their base. Their writers recorded versions of the local word for a spiced sauce, and the idea of a single, all-purpose "curry" began to form in European minds.
Goa also gave the world one dish whose name tells its own story. Vindaloo comes from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos, meat marinated in wine and garlic. In Goa, local cooks made it with vinegar, spices and, in time, plenty of the newly arrived chilli. The fiery restaurant vindaloo of modern Britain is a distant relative, but the Portuguese root is well documented.
A curious footnote: England had a word that looked similar long before any of this. The Forme of Cury, a cookery manuscript from the court of Richard II around 1390, uses "cury" to mean cookery, from the French cuire, to cook. It's a coincidence. Language historians generally treat the two words as unrelated.
How Britain made curry its own
The English East India Company was founded in 1600, and over the following two centuries thousands of its employees came home with a taste for the food they had eaten in India. By 1747 the idea was familiar enough that Hannah Glasse included a recipe for a "currey the India way" in The Art of Cookery, one of the best-selling cookbooks of the century. By the end of the 1700s, ready-mixed curry powder was on sale in London, and that little tin did something important. It turned a whole family of regional cuisines into one flavour you could buy.
In 1810, Sake Dean Mahomed, a traveller and entrepreneur from Bihar, opened the Hindoostane Coffee House in London, widely described as the first Indian restaurant in Britain. It didn't last long, but the appetite did. Anglo-Indian cooks created dishes that belonged to neither country entirely, such as mulligatawny, a soup whose name comes from the Tamil for "pepper water".
The biggest change came in the twentieth century. From the 1950s onwards, many of Britain's "Indian" restaurants were opened by migrants, a large number of them from the Sylhet region of what is now Bangladesh. They built a new, distinctly British repertoire: the balti, closely associated with Birmingham, and chicken tikka masala, whose origin is claimed by several restaurants, with Glasgow's claim the best known. None of these claims can be settled with certainty. What is on record is that in 2001 the Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, described chicken tikka masala as a true British national dish.
Curry goes east: Japan's kare raisu
Japan's curry arrived by an unexpected route: not directly from India, but from Britain. As Japan opened up to the world in the Meiji era, in the late nineteenth century, British-style curry powder came with Western food, and "curry rice" soon appeared in cookbooks and restaurants. The Japanese navy served it widely, and the story usually told is that sailors took the taste home when they left. Japan's Maritime Self-Defense Force is still widely reported to serve curry on Fridays.
Japanese curry went its own way: a thick, glossy, gently sweet sauce, thickened with a roux, poured over short-grain rice. After the Second World War, instant curry roux blocks made it one of the country's great home dishes. Add a breaded pork cutlet and you have katsu curry, a dish that has since travelled back to Britain with its own new fans.
The word kept travelling elsewhere too. Indian indentured labourers taken to the Caribbean, East Africa, Fiji and South Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries brought their cooking with them, which is why curry goat is a Caribbean classic and why Durban has its bunny chow. And English speakers stuck the same label on dishes with entirely separate histories, such as Thai gaeng and Malaysian rendang.
Cooking curry at home today
The best way to cook "curry" is to stop thinking of it as one thing. Pick a dish from a region and follow its logic. A few habits help almost every one of them:
- Bloom whole spices first. Cumin, mustard seeds or cardamom pods sizzled in hot oil for 20–30 seconds release flavour into the fat, and that fat carries it through the whole dish.
- Take your time with the onions. Soft, golden onions (10 minutes or more) give body and sweetness. Rushed onions give a thin, harsh sauce.
- Cook ground spices briefly. Add turmeric, coriander and chilli powder for 30–60 seconds, then add tomatoes or liquid before they scorch.
- Know your curry leaves. Fresh curry leaves are from a small tree and have nothing to do with curry powder. They're nutty and citrusy, and they're superb fried in oil as a final tempering.
- Finish with something bright. A squeeze of lime, a spoonful of yoghurt or a handful of fresh coriander lifts a heavy sauce.
- Let it rest. Most braised curries taste better the next day, once the spices have settled.
If you'd like to cook your way around the map, The World Healthy Kitchen has lighter versions of dishes from this whole story: a Lean Lamb Rogan Josh from Kashmir, a Light Chicken Vindaloo with its Goan roots, Kerala Meen Curry from the old pepper coast and a Light Mulligatawny Soup that nods to the Anglo-Indian kitchen. For the golden spice at the heart of so many of these dishes, read our guide on how to cook with turmeric.
Tip: make your own blend. Instead of a jar of curry powder, toast 2 tsp coriander seeds, 1 tsp cumin seeds, ½ tsp black peppercorns and 3 cloves in a dry pan until fragrant, then grind them with 1 tsp turmeric. Fresh and small is the rule. A blend made this week will beat a jar that's been open for a year.
To see how many ways the world cooks with spice, from Sri Lankan dhal to Thai green curry, search curry in the recipe finder, or take a wider tour in our look at healthy cuisines around the world.
Questions people ask
Is curry Indian or British?
Both, in different senses. The dishes are overwhelmingly South Asian in origin, but the idea of "curry" as one category, and ready-made curry powder, owe a great deal to British usage. Many restaurant favourites, such as chicken tikka masala and the balti, were developed in Britain.
What does the word curry mean?
It's generally traced to the Tamil word kari, used for spiced sauces or relishes eaten with rice. Portuguese and then English speakers adopted and widened it until it covered almost any spiced, sauced dish.
Do Indian cooks use curry powder?
Not usually. Home cooks in India tend to use individual spices and regional blends such as garam masala or sambar powder, often freshly ground. Curry powder as a single, all-purpose mix is largely a British creation.
Why is Japanese curry so different?
Because it came to Japan through British-style curry powder in the late nineteenth century and then developed on its own. It's thickened with a roux, milder and slightly sweet, and eaten with short-grain rice.