What Makes Curry?
Every person who prepares the curry further enriches it with different nuances. Adding coconut milk, ginger, chili, peanuts, anise, olive oil, palm oil are ways to give a personal note to the curry. Almost every cook insists on some individual trait.
"The word curry is problematic both etymologically and in its culinary origins (Leong-Salobir 2011 Leong-Salobir, Cecilia. 2011. Food Culture in Colonial Asia: A Taste of Empire. London: Routledge. [Google Scholar]). Narratives created by British officials and commercial cookbooks shaped the idea of curry. Banerji (2007 Banerji, Chitrita. 2007. Eating India: Exploring a Nation’s Cuisine. Gurgaon: Penguin. [Google Scholar], 47) describes curry as a “slippery eel of a word, bent and stretched to cover almost anything with spicy sauce, a king of misnomers.” Indians referred to their foods with different names but British lumped them together under the name of curry (Collingham 2006 Collingham, Lizzie. 2006. Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors. London: Vintage Books. [Google Scholar]). British learnt the term from the Portuguese as “caril” for broths that Indians made with butter, spices, onion, and ginger (Burton 1993 Burton, David. 1993. The Raj at Table: A Culinary History of British in India. London: Faber and Faber. [Google Scholar]). Hobson-Jobson, a popular dictionary of the nineteenth-century British-Indian English formalized the usage of curry by including the term in its lexicon (Sen 2009 Sen, Colleen Taylor. 2009. Curry: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books. [Google Scholar])." Rohit Varman, 2016, Victoria, Australia.
Curry All Over The World
India is the country from where Europeans (the British and Portuguese) got the idea of a pre made spice combination powder. Indians would grind several different spices and herbs and separately store them for later use when cooking. During preparation of broths they would add the spices and herbs according to the intended flavor and aroma. The Portuguese called this "caril" and the the British traders adopted the term and ended up inventing pre made curry powder due to a lack of understanding of the individual nuances of adding each spice and herb separately.
The idea of pre making the powder had its merits and it was adopted by the Portuguese and Indians as well. Indeed it's a fast and practical way to store the herbs and spices and to prepare certain meat and fish dishes without losing that much time on preparation. The focus is more on cooking, less on preparing.
The most well known "curries" in India are garam masala (there as many variations of this as there are regions and families), the vindaloo curry from Goa (originated on the Portuguese carne em Vinha d'Alhos, hence the name), the world famous Madras curry, the sweet curry, and the brilliant Maharajah Curry Powder.
In the UK, the most famous are Chicken Tikka Masala, Madras curry (made with chicken or lamb).
The Portuguese usually cook it with chicken. It is consumed mainly in Lisbon area and by families that had contact with Africa and or Asia. There are pakistani, bangladesh and indian communities in the country who also produce their own powders which makes it easy to find excellent quality curries. Some families use it to cook shrimp and pork. Some people enjoy the hot varieties of several curries.
In Mozambique and South Africa it's usual to cook seafood and meats with it, mainly chicken. In the Maputo area it's notable the use of peanut when preparing the curry. The coconut milk and palm butter are almost mandatory.
With population migrations and trade, curry powder reached the entire world. It's popular in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, South Africa, Mozambique, Morocco, Australia, England, France, The Netherlands, Portugal, Trinidad and Jamaica and a lot more. As Rohit Varman notes in the Journal Consumption Markets and Culture: "Some researchers consider it as a sign of globalization that allows goods and ideas from different parts of the world to seamlessly circulate without privileging a particular location. For example, Sen (2009 Sen, Colleen Taylor. 2009. Curry: A Global History. London: Reaktion Books.
[Google Scholar] , 7) notes, “if any dish deserves to be called global, it is curry. From Newfoundland to the Antarctic, from Beijing to Warsaw, there is scarcely a piece where curries are not enjoyed.” In this essay, I offer a critical reading of the iconicity of curry in the context of its British appropriation and entanglements in the webs of colonization and commercialization. Despite its iconic status, curry is a signifier of domination and global hierarchy. Instead of interpreting globalization that creates marketplace icons as a set of flows, curry helps to see it as unequal and asymmetrical pathways of transnational transactions (Gupta 2012 Gupta, Akhil. 2012. “A Different History of the Present: The Movement of Crops, Cuisines, and Globalization.” In Curried Cultures: Globalization, Food, and South Asia, edited by Krishendu Ray and Tulasi Srinivas, 29–47. Berkeley: University of California Press. [Google Scholar] ).
In Portugal it's possible to find curry in Indian, African and Chinese restaurants. Many Portuguese who lived or were born in Mozambique also prepare the dish regularly but somehow the spiced mix was never fully incorporated into traditional Portuguese culinary. These families have their own specific curry variations (with crab, shrimps, chicken, pork, cow, lamb, peanuts, coconut and so on). Apart from that it's not really used in Portuguese dishes.
The "Chicken with curry" variant usually found in Portuguese restaurants is a poor adaptation that resembles boiled chicken with a pinch of a sweet soft curry powder. Run away from that as much as possible and try and find some Portuguese who had or has ties with Africa.
Curry in Portugal
In Portugal it's possible to find curry in Indian, African and Chinese restaurants. Many Portuguese who lived or were born in Mozambique also prepare the dish regularly but somehow the spiced mix was never fully incorporated into traditional Portuguese culinary. These families have their own specific curry variations (with crab, shrimps, chicken, pork, cow, lamb, peanuts, coconut and so on). Apart from that it's not really used in Portuguese dishes.
The "Chicken with curry" variant usually found in Portuguese restaurants is a poor adaptation that resembles boiled chicken with a pinch of a sweet soft curry powder. Run away from that as much as possible and try and find some Portuguese who had or has ties with Africa.
How to choose
The best way to have fine control over the quality of each component, their flavor and strength and the percentage of each one on the final powder is to get the individual herbs and spices and crush them with a mortar and pestle.
For most of us that is just not an option either by the difficulty in getting the spices, the lack of storage space, lack of time or the cost of it. The best way then is to buy premade powder from the supermarket.
When looking for curry on the market avoid curries like the ones you see on the left. The first thing you notice is the bright yellow colour, indicative of high content of turmeric and less of coriander and cumins. Other indication of a not so pleasant combination of ingredients is the way these powders tend to create crumbs instead of staying a even, dry and loose powder. The flavor of this kind of curry powder is aggressive, the aroma is not rich in herbal nuances and usually there are no hot varieties.
Packaging is also a factor in guaranteeing you get a great flavor from your curry. I tend to avoid plastic containers. If you find a good curry in a plastic container such as the example below be sure to check the validity and to consume the entire quantity as soons as possible. When you get home take the curry out of the plastic and store in a wood or tin container. Before you carry on reading this, take a look at the colour of both curries in these images (above and below). Answer these questions: What are the differences you find? What are the factors that can justify these differences?
Glass is better but you have to make sure the jar won't get sunlight while in storage. Here's an example:
The best packaging is tin cans with a lid. No light can hit the herbs and spices, they are a lot better to store and transport and the product stays almost as new until you open the can for the first time. Two good packaging examples from two very well known brands:
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See also
The article below on CNN lets you know more about curry on different parts of the world: India, Japan, The Caribbean, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Maldives, South Africa, Malaysia, Indonesia, South Korea and The United Kingdom.
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/curry-origins-history/index.html
https://edition.cnn.com/travel/article/curry-origins-history/index.html
An article from South China Morning Post, by Bhakti Mathur on the history of vindaloo curry:
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