Curry

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Kari and Curry

The name seems to comes from the Indian (Tamil(verify)) word kari, which seemingly can be used to mean (among other things) savoury dish, or sauce in a fairly broad sense, or black pepper(verify).

The British imported a fairly specific spice mix in colonial times and called it curry. As a result, a moderately specific type of indian-themed dishes became known to the Brits as curry, or a curry, plural curries.

These dishes are also something of a westernization. comparable to how what the west calls Chinese food isn't really what Chinese people eat, because they are adapted for local tastes and the ingredients people already ate.

So the word curry, and it referring to a dish, are purely British invention, and will not refer to to the same things in India.

In the end, curry still ended up being a good translation for (dry) masala, a local-ish spice mix you'ld have on your shelf (ground or not) for various dishes.

Curry powder

Outside of India there are often just a few mixes sold as 'curry mix' or 'curry powder', and often one or two per specific brand that sells it.

Note that Garam masala is a similar idea, though it may be also be sold in mixed but non-ground form.

The core of most is regularly roughly turmeric, coriander, cumin, and fenugreek, with a lot of variation beyond that.

Other ingredients commonly include things such as ginger, garlic, peppers (e.g. black or white pepper and/or cayenne), mustardseed, galanga (Laos), cinnamon, and perhaps also fennel seed, cloves, cardamom, mace, nutmeg, allspice, caraway, anise and others.

Local variants

• curry (powder)

in that each brand and country may have its own variant, though it often sticks around what's described above

• kerrie (mostly around Netherlands, and Belgium)

stable for a specific brand, but quite varied between them - it's hard to tell.

Some may be almost like curry powder

some seem largely turmeric with maybe a little pepper, cumen, or such, and generally not spicy

• Curry Gewürz, a condiment mostly seen around Germany

there regularly shortened to just Curry, which a ketchup-ish thing with less salt and more spices

Curry leaves

...as used in Indian cooking, come from either Murraya koenigii or Bergera koenigii. They look like bay leaves, but taste very different.