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The History Of Indian Curry Stretches Back Several Millennia

Column: industry Tag: indian curry,food,facts Published: 2024-12-19 10:45 Source: www.mashed.com Author: Sam WorleyDec. 17

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On one hand, the "Jurassic Park" dream of cloning dinosaurs based on miraculously preserved DNA hasn't yet come to pass. But on the other hand, today's scientists are cooking up something nearly as good that's much less likely to wreak havoc on a remote island: They can replicate curry dishes that people were preparing in Asia over four millennia ago.

Scientists are unearthing the prehistory of curry across multiple research sites in South and Southeast Asia. In 2010, archaeologists working near Delhi, India were able to scrape molecules off shards of 4,500-year-old cooking vessels that suggested the presence of aubergine, ginger, turmeric, and garlic. Together, these ingredients look a lot like an eggplant curry, courtesy of the Indus civilization. Then, in 2016, a separate group of scientists announced the discovery of 2,000-year-old spices — including ginger, clove, turmeric, and nutmeg — on stone cooking tools at a site in Vietnam. Not only that: The nutmeg was still fragrant.

These findings give archaeologists and historians a better understanding of how both people and spice traveled in ancient times, and they shed further light on the global history of "curry" — a complicated name for a deliciously complicated dish. The cooking vessels at the Vietnamese site, for instance, were believed to have come from South Asia, suggesting that people traveled from there to the southeast part of the continent via the Indian Ocean, bringing curry and cookware with them.

Curry has a very long, very complicated history

The History Of Indian Curry Stretches Back Several Millennia

Tara Abdillah/Shutterstock

One thing scientists studying the Vietnamese site noted was that the flavors of the 2,000-year-old curry were very similar to the flavors you might find there today, combining components of curry powders from India, like turmeric, with local ingredients like galangal. Moreover, the similarities between present-day Vietnamese curries and Indian curries give credence to the idea that curry as we know it today originated in India and spread from there.

That said, "curry" is both a complicated concept and a relatively recent invention. It comes from the 17th century, when Portuguese colonists in India encountered "kari," a Tamil word referring to spiced stew over rice. They brought the word back to Europe, where it was adapted into English as "curry" and subsequently applied to all manner of spiced dishes that colonists encountered in Asia, despite the fact that "curry" looks very different between India, Thailand, Malaysia, Japan, and elsewhere. Even today, the word is sometimes used by Westerners to describe dishes that really aren't curries at all — like butter chicken recipes, for instance.

Despite the persistence of many types of curry around the world today, the word is sometimes seen as a colonial relic that's poorly suited to describing a whole panoply of culinary preparations from a vast array of places and traditions. Whatever you like to call it, though, "curry" was clearly a thing in South Asia long before Europeans showed up — roughly four millennia before, as we now know.

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