
Curry Before Columbus - Thevet
https://contingentmagazine.org/2020/06/25/curry-before-columbus/
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patrickaljord
I've lived in Peru which also has a very spicy cuisine (many chilis come from
the Andes). However, you'd be surprised at the amount of locals who confessed
to me they didn't like food that is too spicy (they like it mildly spiced, or
white people spiced as the article says) or spicy at all. It wouldn't surprise
me if these two combined would represent 50% of the population. Could be the
same in India.

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vishnugupta
There’s a tendency to conflate “spicy” flavor with “chilly” or “hot”. They are
two orthogonal parameters, you could dial (up or down) them independent of
each other. Most spices aren’t chilly, they add unique smell and flavor
without burning the tongue.

Coming to India, almost every cuisine is spicy for sure. At least I don’t know
of one that is not. Indians grow up immersed in spicy food and can’t live
without it. And to be honest once your palette gets used to spicy flavor it’s
hard to go back to bland food. Anecdotally I’ve heard many westerns complain
about blandness of their food once they are used to Indian flavor.

Very few Indian cuisines dual up “hot” knob. Andhra Pradesh cuisine is an
example of that. It’s almost at the limit of not killing the flavor.

So to summarize about India, we almost universally love spicy food. Some of us
like it hot too

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9nGQluzmnq3M
Hotness is relative though: they may not "dial it up" by Indian standards, but
chili still makes its way into almost everything. A Russian colleague of mine
visiting Delhi, not generally regarded as a hotbed of hotness, found virtually
everything except dal makhani inedibly spicy -- because she was used to
Russian food, where chilis traditionally don't feature at all.

India is also one of the few places I've been to where chilis are regularly
used for breakfast dishes and even drinks like _aam ka panna_ (spicy green
mango juice).

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throwaway0a5e
Sure but did she find it spicy as in "having copious amounts of spice" or
spicy as "a taste similar to food that is of a high temperature" or spicy as
in "off-gassing something that irritates one's nasal passages" (I don't really
consider this last one "spicy" or "hot" but many people do so I'm including
it)?

To reply that "hotness is relative" without clarifying which usage of the word
you mean or implying that your friend in the anecdote even made that
clarification is exactly what the person you are replying to is complaining
about.

This limitation of colloquial English where the word "spicy" is overloaded to
refer to all three axis of "spicy" at the same time and hot is also (though
less frequently) overloaded in the same manner is exactly what we're
discussing.

You can have something that's not very "hot" be very "spicy" on one of the
other two axis. Try eating a tablespoon of cinnamon or that Chinese mustard
that comes with takeout.

European food that is "spicy" on one axis but nearly zero on the other two is
rare hence why this overloading exists and isn't really a problem when
discussing food from anywhere that doesn't have a rainy season.

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exhaze
Can’t speak for the rest of the anglosphere, but in the US, when someone says
“spicy”, they mean “this has too much capsaicin”. If someone were referring to
the strength of the taste, they would probably just say “I don’t like this
flavor”, or as a stretch, “the spices in this dish are too strong”. Not sure
what point you’re making here. I assure you, even though there may not be
dedicated words for them, English speakers are quite able to articulate the
differences between the different categories of plants that are added to food
to make it taste better.

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ggm
... curry leaf gets a mention. So let's talk about curry leaf in the context
of curry not being a 'thing' ... I have a curry leaf plant and we use it in
our dal, and in rogan josh (a curry but also not a curry) and spinach and
potato diahes

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mrob
Although I don't read medieval Persian, my guess is that "burned vegetable
oil" would be better translated as "mustard oil heated to its smoke point".
Mustard oil was (and still is) a common cooking oil in the region, and heating
it to high temperature reduces the pungent taste.

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bogomipz
Indeed the versatile tomato could almost be seen historically as a calling
card from the Portuguese. In Brazil one can eat Moquecas which are a spicy
tomato-based stew which sometimes resemble the the spicy fish curries in the
South of India. And in the US red chowder which is often inexplicably called
"Manhattan chowder" is actually Rhode Island clam chowder, Rhode Island being
a state with a large Portuguese population. And in Portugal itself Refogado is
tomato sauce that forms the basis of many wonderful stews, soups and rice
dishes there.

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reactspa
2 other potential sources of the word "curry"

\- kadhai (Indian wok)

\- Kari patta: a spicy leaf, staple in South Indian cuisine (and very tasty)

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twic
So no connection to "cury" then:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Forme_of_Cury)

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stevula
According to Wiktionary, the existing Middle English word "cury" (= "cooking")
may have influenced the word.

[https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1)

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sajithdilshan
As Sri Lankans, "Curry" for us would be a dish made by mixing a variety of
powdered spices with coconut milk and made into a sauce. If this sauce is
cooked along with chicken it's called chicken curry and so on. But it has to
be a dish made out of coconut milk and spices.

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Finnucane
Just before the lockdown I threw away some hing that had been on my spice rack
for a long time. Way longer than one should keep spices. So I went to the
local spice shop to stock up on some items, including a fresh jar of
asefetida. I had forgotten how pungent it is when fresh. Now when I open the
cabinet it hits me.

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rob74
Interesting! I have never heard of this particular spice before, although I
may have already eaten it at an Indian restaurant. As to the "pungent" part,
it's already in the name:

> _The English name is derived from asa, a latinised form of Persian azā,
> meaning "resin", and Latin foetidus meaning "smelling, fetid", which refers
> to its strong sulfurous odour_

The German names are even less flattering:

> _Asant (Ferula assa-foetida), auch bekannt als Stinkasant oder Teufelsdreck_
> \- "stinking asant" or "devil's dirt"...

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subpixel
I only learned about it when attempting to cook Indian food via YouTube
recipes. A game changer!

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miguel_rdp
An ad hominem side note: the author should try probiotics

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55555
They've had serious digestive problems since they were three years old and
appear extremely well educated. They almost certainly have tried probiotics.

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basicplus2
Curry is curry due to it containing tumeric, and tumeric is native to India.

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmeric](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turmeric)

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AmericanChopper
You may as well say curry is curry because it has cumin in it, and cumin is
native to India. Curry is really just a word made up by non-Indians to
describe spicy gravy, or depending on who you ask, it can be used to describe
any sufficiently spiced food. If you google curry potatoes, you’ll find plenty
of recipes. If you google jeera aloo (which literally just translates to cumin
potato) you’ll find plenty of very similar recipes. You can also find plenty
of recipes for Thai, Indonesian, Malaysian... curries, and the only thing they
have in common with Indian curries is use of spice and a gravy textured sauce,
but using completely different spice bases and cooking techniques.

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twoslide
I've spent about 3 years in India, through a combination of work and family,
and rarely see anything called "curry" on menus. Part of what this author
seems to be getting at is that "curry" reflects a colonial viewpoint that
homogenizes groups outsite the west. Thus, Indians, Thais and Japanese food
has "curries" (even though these curries are very different from one another).
In contrast Hungarians have "Goulash."

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AmericanChopper
To say it’s colonial is a bit of a stretch. It’s simply a word chosen by a
group of outsiders to categorize something they didn’t know much about.

The more relevant criticism of the word boils down to the facts that it
doesn’t really mean anything to Indians, and that it’s meaning is so poorly
defined that it barely means anything at all. The word can be used to refer to
pretty much any Indian food, which is simply a poor categorization, and that
use would wind up a lot of Indian people. The other use case is pretty much
anything that has a spiced gravy. But a ragu uses spiced gravy as much as a
butter chicken does, and most people wouldn’t call a ragu a curry. So it must
be a spiced gravey with Asian ingredients, but a Japanese curry has more
ingredients in common with a ragu than it does a saag paneer, also a lamb
tagine dish uses a spiced gravy with Asian ingredients, and people wouldn’t
call that a curry either.

Basically it’s a word that has no definition that would describe all of its
different use cases.

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DanBC
> To say it’s colonial is a bit of a stretch. It’s simply a word chosen by a
> group of outsiders to categorize something they didn’t know much about.

A group of British outsiders who were in India because of the British Empire?

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AmericanChopper
There’s absolutely nothing uniquely colonial about coming up with words to
describe things that are new to you. It’s simply a result of one culture
coming into contact with another. To say using language to describe new things
is colonial is frankly ridiculous.

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bregma
But it brings a certain je ne sais quoi to the sturm und drang of everyday
life for the hoi polloi.

