My house smells amazing.
I just cooked six types of curry, and my house smells like a food stall in Calcutta, or a kitchen in Guangzhou, or a home in Thailand, or a crowded street in Tibet, or a cafeteria in Kashmir, or a pub in England.
Actually, it smells like all of them, all at the same time.
It’s heaven. Absolute culinary heaven.
Curry, in its original incarnation, is any kind of sauce or gravy in Indian cooking. Usually, it is heavily seasoned with a mixture of pungent and potent spices such as cumin, fennel or cinnamon. The British, who colonized India, loved the flavor of these dishes but apparently misinterpreted the Tamil word “kari,” which might have meant “sauce.” They thought it meant the assortment of spices that flavor it.
Eager to bring these tastes back to England, British soldiers blended a mixture of their favorite Indian spices and called it curry powder. It is this powder that went around the world, creating what most of the globe thinks of as curries.
The exception is Thailand. While some dishes in that country do use a mixture of dry spices similar to the English conception of curry powder, most Thai curries begin with one of several pastes made from ground-up herbs.