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6 Min
09/03/2026
Trust colonial powers to generalise something hard to capture under an umbrella time – the curry recipe! The word ‘curry’ likely comes from the Tamil word kari, meaning sauce, but it was the British who popularised it in the 18th century as a catch-all label for India’s countless spiced gravies. Instead of recognising the nuanced differences between a Bengali jhol, a Goan vindaloo, or a Chettinad masala, everything became simply ‘curry’ in colonial cookbooks.
Few dishes have travelled as far, changed as much, and sparked as much debate as curry. Long before it became a comfort food across the world and made influencers lose their heads over the ‘flavour and spices’, the curry recipe was evolving through trade and cultural exchange. Ancient spice routes brought turmeric, pepper, and cinnamon across continents, inspiring local twists like Thai coconut curries or Caribbean curry goat.
Today, curry even pops up in pop culture, from Japanese kare raisu in anime like Shokugeki no Soma to celebrity chefs on Netflix reimagining classic Indian curries. Today, it fills menus from London to Tokyo to Kingston, Jamaica, and yet the word itself doesn't exist in any of India's 23 officially recognised languages. That irony is exactly what makes Curry's story worth telling.
The story of curry stretches all the way back to the Indus Valley Civilisation, which dates from around 3300 BCE to 1300 BCE. Archaeologists have found evidence that people there used a mortar and pestle to powder spices such as cumin, fennel, and tamarind and mixed them into food.
The word first appeared in English around the 1590s, probably adopted via Portuguese ‘caril’, which was derived from a mingling of various south Indian Dravidian words, including Middle Kannada, Middle Tamil, and Malayalam ‘kari’, referring often to something ‘black in colour’ or ‘burnt’, which applied broadly to spices and meats.
The Dravidian source is most likely Tamil kaṟi, meaning a spiced mixture with fish, meat, or vegetables, eaten with boiled rice, and it was described in a 17th-century Portuguese cookbook based on trade with Tamil merchants along the Coromandel Coast of southeast India, becoming known as a spice blend called kari podi or curry powder.
Before the British ever arrived in India, the Portuguese were already reshaping the subcontinent's food. In 1498, over a century before the British arrived, the Portuguese came through and introduced chilli peppers to the subcontinent. This forever changed South Asian cuisine, and multiple Indian dishes, most notably producing the acidic and spicy Goan vindaloo.
The original vindaloo recipe contained more than 20 types of peppers combined with pork, and black pepper was mixed with tamarind water. When the coveted ‘black gold’ (black pepper) was exported out of India, the Portuguese began to use red chiles instead of black pepper because they were more affordable.
Portuguese traders in the Tamil-speaking region encountered the term kari and transliterated it as caril or caree. They then broadened the term by applying it to almost any spiced, stew-like dish – a trend the British would continue.
At the height of British presence in India, there were about 250,000 members of the British army residing there. After the 1857 Great Indian Mutiny, British bureaucrats came to India of their own will. Their love for Indian food, access to spices, and adaptation of local dishes to fit their palates gave birth to the modern style of curry dishes known today.
As the British bureaucrats moved around India, they took their cooks with them, spreading Indian-inspired dishes suited to British flavour profiles. This is how curry cuisine evolved. Some of this culinary cross-pollination produced dishes (like Mulligatawny soup) that have since become classics in their own right.
At the end of the 18th century, the British formally standardised spice blends known as curry powders so they could recreate their favourite dishes consistently in the absence of their Indian cooks. The first recipes for curry powder appeared in the English cookbook The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy by Hannah Glasse in 1747.
With commercial curry powder, British cooks could replicate the flavour of Indian cuisine. In traditional Indian cookery, however, spice mixtures are called masala and are prepared fresh at home, not bought off a shelf.
In India, these spice blends are specific to individual dishes, typically made by toasting and grinding whole spices as needed. Curry powder, as a catch-all commercial product, is a British interpretation of that tradition.
Once the British packaged curry into a powder and a concept, it travelled with their empire. In the 19th century, curry was carried to the Caribbean by Indian indentured workers in the British sugar industry. Since the mid-20th century, curries of many national styles have become popular far from their origins, increasingly becoming part of international fusion cuisine. Food writer Alan Davidson writes that curry's worldwide reach is the result of the Indian diaspora and globalisation, beginning within the British Empire.
In the mid-1800s, British merchants introduced curry powder to Japan, where it was used to flavour a butter and flour-based gravy. Today, it is often served over fried pork cutlets in a dish called katsu karē. Japan then passed the not-so-novel idea to Korea during WWII.
The French developed their own curry powder called vadouvan, taking its name from vadagam in Tamil, which comes from the Union Territory of Puducherry. In Germany, Denmark, and the Netherlands, curry-flavoured ketchup became a popular condiment for sausages and fries.
This is the best space to answer if the world-famous chicken tikka masala is actually British. That’s a yes and a no, as it was a Pakistani-origin chef in Scotland who cooked up this irresistible dish in the 1970s.
He did what an Indian chef did with butter chicken masala – traditionally a kebab-style skewer that was simmered in a creamy sauce that is the same one that is used in the North Indian butter chicken, which was an attempt to please the British palate. It worked, and in 2001, British Foreign Secretary Robin Cook described chicken tikka masala as a true British national dish.
There's an irony at the heart of all this. In the past, all traditional Indian dishes were called by specific names referring to their ingredients, region of origin, and cooking methods. Along with the British Raj and the spread of Indian cuisine westward came the generalisation of many dishes being called simply ‘curry’, with their original Indian titles often lost to history or simply no longer used.
