Spices for curry, and what the word is hiding

Curry is an English word applied from the outside to a very large number of dishes. Its likely root is the Tamil kari, and the modern usage was shaped by British colonial encounter and export — no South Asian cuisine has a category corresponding to it, and a cook in Kerala, Punjab or Bengal would name the specific dish rather than reach for the general term.

That matters practically rather than only politically. A recipe titled "curry" gives no information about which spices it needs, and the shopping lists that circulate under that heading are usually the North Indian restaurant palette presented as universal.

Three quite separate things also travel under the name in shops. Curry powder is a British commercial blend, developed for export and not used in Indian home cooking. Curry leaf is an unrelated aromatic leaf used in South Indian and Sri Lankan cooking, which is not an ingredient of curry powder and has nothing to do with it. And curry as a family of dishes is the loosest usage of the three.

For North Indian and British Indian restaurant cooking — the style the word usually conjures — the working set is small. Cumin and coriander seed are the backbone and appear in almost everything. Turmeric supplies colour and a background earthiness. Chilli supplies heat, and which chilli matters: Kashmiri chilli is chosen for deep colour and moderate heat, ordinary chilli powder for heat alone. Garam masala supplies the warm aromatics — cardamom, cassia, cloves — and is usually added at the end rather than cooked from the start.

Ginger and garlic are not spices but are structural, generally as a fresh paste fried early.

That is five spices and two aromatics, and it covers a great deal. Adding fenugreek, black cardamom, bay and asafoetida broadens the range considerably without adding complexity to the technique.

The technique matters as much as the list. Whole spices go into hot fat at the start; ground spices go in after the onions and before the liquid, and burn in seconds if the pan is too hot; garam masala goes in at the end because its aromatics are volatile. A dish made with the right spices in the wrong order tastes raw or scorched rather than under-spiced.

South India and Sri Lanka move towards mustard seed, curry leaf, fenugreek, black pepper and coconut, with tamarind as the souring agent and a tempering poured over at the end rather than built at the start. The technique is different, not just the list.

Bengal and the east use panch phoron — five whole seeds bloomed in mustard oil — and lean on nigella, mustard and fennel in a way the north does not.

Thailand and Southeast Asia are a different cuisine wearing the same English word. The base is a pounded wet paste of galangal, lemongrass, kaffir lime, chilli and shrimp paste, with coconut milk, and dry ground spices play a minor role. Substituting ginger for galangal here is the single most common way a Thai curry ends up tasting wrong.

Japanese curry descends from the British naval version and is built on a roux and a commercial curry powder, sweeter and thicker than anything in South Asia.

Caribbean curry uses its own curry powders, generally heavy on turmeric, with allspice and scotch bonnet, and is a distinct tradition rather than an offshoot.

Curry powder is a real ingredient with a real history and it is not a shortcut to Indian cooking. It was developed as a British export product, standardising a variable idea into a jar, and it is used in British, Japanese and Caribbean cooking as an ingredient in its own right rather than as a substitute for a spice cupboard.

Used as intended it is perfectly good. Used in place of individually added spices in a North Indian dish it produces something recognisably different — flatter, more uniform, and dominated by turmeric, which outlasts the aromatics around it and comes to dominate an older tin.

If you own a tin, the useful thing to know is that adding garam masala at the end and a little fresh ginger and garlic at the start closes much of the gap.

Whole cumin and coriander seed, ground turmeric, a chilli powder chosen for what you want it to do, and either a garam masala or the components to make one. Ginger and garlic fresh.

Buy from a South Asian grocer if there is one. The same spices cost a fraction of supermarket prices, the turnover is far higher, and the packets are large enough that grinding your own becomes obviously worthwhile.

Resist buying the long list at once. Cook a few dishes with the short one, notice what is missing, and buy that. A cupboard assembled this way is smaller, fresher and more used than one bought in an afternoon.