Katsu Curry

, British Curry: A Look Into Curry’s Journey, Rendition, And Global Evolution

Quick Summary

Curry means a completely different dish depending on which part of the world you're in. In a Japanese kitchen, katsu curry or curry rice is common; in a Thai kitchen, various Thai curries are prepared. Some countries use a ground, bottled spice blend and some a fresh-pounded paste (the very corner of the country where curry came from), and in the place most people credit as its birthplace, not really one single dish at all. 

Deep Dive

Curry is a word that different cuisines have picked up and rebuilt entirely on their own terms. In India, it refers to a spiced, gravy-based preparation built around freshly ground masalas that vary from region to region. In Japan, curry is a mild, roux-thickened stew ladled over rice. In Britain, it's a restaurant-kitchen invention with its own base gravy system and its own menu of dishes that don't exist anywhere in India. In Thailand, curry refers to a fresh herb-and-chilli paste simmered in coconut milk. Across the Caribbean, it's a turmeric-heavy powder carried across oceans by Indian indentured labourers and folded into island cooking. One word that might not be the ingenious formulation of a culinary maverick travelled for over 400 years, has ended up meaning something slightly different in every single place it landed.

The Word Before The Dish

Most etymologists trace ‘curry’ to the Tamil word ‘kari’, used in South India to mean a spiced sauce or a stir-fried side dish, though there's scholarly disagreement here, with some sources pointing instead to a related Kannada root, and the two theories have been debated back and forth for over a century. 

What isn't disputed is the route by which the word had travelled, and ‘kari’ became the Portuguese ‘caril’ through trade on India's west coast, and the word was anglicised into ‘curry’ by British traders and colonial administrators by the 1590s. By the 1680s, the English were already using ‘curry’ as a term for any spiced, sauced dish from outside India too, which is exactly why an Indonesian, Malaysian or Thai curry can carry the same name as something from Kerala despite sharing almost no technique with it.

You can learn more about curry’s journey in India right here, since curry never originated in India and this is often conflated. In India, here is how curry manifests, even though it can be a grave insult to many for even attempting to pen something like this:

• Bengali jhol: this is behind many a Bengali fish curry recipe, and tends to be a light, thin, everyday gravy, usually featuring freshwater fish, potatoes and simple spices.

• Punjabi makhani: a rich, smooth tomato-based gravy, enriched with butter, cream and often cashew, used in some of the most famous dishes like butter chicken.

• Western kadhi: a tangy yoghurt-and-besan gravy, ranging from thick and creamy Punjabi kadhi with pakoras to lighter regional versions.

• Kerala moilee: a mild, creamy coconut-milk gravy, particularly associated with fish, with ginger, green chilli, turmeric and curry leaves.

• Hyderabadi salan: a thin, nutty and tangy gravy, usually made with peanuts, sesame and coconut; famously served alongside biryani.

• Kashmiri yakhni: a delicate, yoghurt-based gravy flavoured with whole spices such as fennel and dried ginger; fragrant rather than aggressively hot.

These are distinct dishes with distinct names in their own languages, and ‘curry’ is the flattening umbrella term the British applied to all of them. Curry powder, the standardised, pre-mixed spice blend sold in tins, is itself a British invention of the 18th and 19th centuries, created for homesick colonials and merchants who wanted a taste of Indian flavour without access to fresh spices to make masalas.

An Overview Of Curry In Different Countries

From Kolkata To Kyoto’s Japanese Katsu Curry

Japan's relationship with curry didn't come directly from India but arrived secondhand via the British. During the Meiji era, the British Royal Navy introduced its own anglicised, curry-powder version of Indian food to the Japanese Imperial Navy, which adopted it because it was affordable, easy to cook in bulk, and carried no regional food biases that might cause friction among sailors drawn from across Japan. The Japanese Navy served it over rice instead of the bread the British ate it with, and that substitution is how Japanese curry came to be.

What really set it apart, beyond its Indian regional flavours, texture, and mouthfeel, was the thickener. Japanese cooks folded curry powder into a French-style roux (flour cooked in fat), which is a European technique with no real precedent in Indian cooking. That roux is what gives Japanese curry its now-signature thick, glossy, mellow texture plus taste, rather than the layered, spice-based flavours of an Indian gravy. This placed curry rice (karē raisu) firmly inside yōshoku, the category of Western-influenced dishes that Japan built during its rapid modernisation. Curry sat alongside things like omelette rice and croquettes as Japan's idea of Western food, even though its actual roots trace back to India.

That was the story of curry rice, and the final piece of the puzzle came later, which was the ‘katsu’. At some point, the Japanese began serving the curry alongside a breaded, deep-fried cutlet called tonkatsu (typically pork, though chicken katsu is just as common now). Combine the two, and you get katsu curry: a crisp cutlet, a thick, mellow sauce, and steamed rice, a dish with almost no resemblance to anything you'd order in Chennai or Lucknow, despite the name it still carries.

The British Indian Restaurant (BIR)

If Japan reinvented curry through a French cooking technique, Britain reinvented it through their local restaurants. The modern British curry house has a surprisingly narrow lineage, with the overwhelming majority of UK curry house owners tracing their roots to Sylhet, a region in what is now Bangladesh, whose seamen and later migrants opened Britain's first Indian eating houses and, eventually, the takeaway-and-restaurant services now known simply as BIR: British Indian Restaurant style.

BIR cooking owes surprisingly little to how curry is actually cooked in Indian homes, and this was not accidental. Indian curries vary in terms of preparation time, and some richer curry recipes are meant for slow cooking, which doesn't work in a restaurant kitchen trying to turn out dozens of different dishes a night. So BIR kitchens built a system instead of formulating a single, large-batch ‘base gravy’, which is a blended stock of slow-cooked onions and a handful of other vegetables, that gets ladled into nearly every dish on the menu, along with a standardised spice blend called ‘mix powder’ and pre-cooked meat. A korma, a rogan josh and a vindaloo can all start from the same pot of base gravy, differentiated only by what's added in the final few minutes of cooking.

Curry As A Medium, Not A Dish

Once you stop looking for the ‘correct’ curry recipe, what gets interesting is how differently South Asian and Southeast Asian cooking use the same idea, a protein or vegetable, simmered in a spiced liquid, as a medium that bends to whatever's locally available.

• Bengal treats curry as an everyday dish, not an occasion dish, with macher jhol and rice being part of everyday lunches cooked in mustard oil, panch phoron, a five-seed blend of fenugreek, nigella, cumin, mustard and fennel, or other spices, and traditionally uses bony freshwater fish like rohu or hilsa.

• Thailand makes Thai curry from a paste, not a powder, with chilli, lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shallots, and shrimp paste, freshly pounded rather than dry-roasted and ground as Indian spice blends are.

• The Caribbean curry powder blends turmeric, coriander, fenugreek, and cumin with island ingredients like allspice (locally called pimento), scotch bonnet chillies and fresh thyme, and simmers everything in coconut milk. A Jamaican curry chicken recipe today is a hybrid of Indian spices, African cooking techniques, and ingredients native to the island.

Curry powder, in other words, is the one constant thread running underneath nearly every non-Indian version of this dish, which is exactly why a simple chicken curry recipe using nothing more than a good curry powder, onions and a tin of tomatoes is often the closest most cooks outside South Asia ever get to understanding how the whole idea has travelled all over the world.