Toronto-based Taimoor Farouk shares tales from the Pakistani diaspora with Dawn.com.

Canada’s largest celebration of home cooking and eating, the 17th Annual Good Food Festival & Market, starts next month near Toronto. One hopes that the two-day event will help clarify some misconceptions about the word ‘curry’, which much of the Western world thinks comes out of a jar labeled ‘curry powder’.

Since arriving in Canada, I have learnt what sheer joy a specialty food and cooking channel can bring into the lives of those who are far from home. During the Canadian winter, which makes birds and people alike scatter in search of warmth, my friend and I decided to get together on Monday evenings and watch one of our favourite television shows, ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ created by the renowned Chef Gordon Ramsay. It made us forget about the weather for a while and allowed us to share recipes, cook, and argue over what exactly a curry is.

To satiate my own curiosity, I decided to question random people from different backgrounds about what they thought of curry. The results were astonishing. Out of 20 respondents, 10 Canadians described it as a ‘yellow liquid’, ‘garam masala’, ‘butter chicken’, ‘powder’, and ‘spicy’. The rest, mostly South Asians, used ambiguous terms such as ‘spicy’ and ‘Indian food’ or explained curry as ‘something used in Pakistani, Indian, Bengali and Thai cuisines’. After one Middle Eastern friend described curry as ‘a well-known herb grown in North Central Asia’, I knew that it was time to set the record straight.

Knowing that the word curry is rooted in the culinary history of the Far East, I decided to check out a historical dictionary of Anglo-Indian words and terms. The dictionary initially describes the word curry as ‘savoury preparation added as a relish, or ‘kitchen’ to food having little taste’. The dictionary also provides historical background:

It consists of meat, fish, fruit, or vegetables, cooked with a quantity of bruised spices and turmeric; and a little of this gives a flavour to a large mess of rice. The word is Tam. Kari, i.e. sauce… It is remarkable in how many countries a similar dish is habitual; pilao in the analogous mess in Persia, and kuskussu in Algeria; in Egypt a dish well known as ruzz mufalfal, or peppered rice. In England the proportions of rice and ‘kitchen’ are usually reversed, so that the latter is made to constitute the bulk of the dish.

The dictionary also alludes to the Tamil origin of the word, and goes on to explain the Europeanization of curry:

It should be added that kari was, among the people of S. India, the name of only one form of ‘kitchen’ for rice, viz. of that in consistency resembling broth.… Europeans have applied it to all the savoury concoctions of analogous spicy character eaten with rice.

On a different note, the BBC blog h2g2 mentions the names of various spices that can be used to make curry, along with their medicinal uses:

A curry is a dish containing sautéed garlic, onions (unless religion or culture forbids their use) and varying amounts of most of the following spices: turmeric, cumin, coriander, ginger, chilli, cardamom, black pepper, cloves, fenugreek, and fennel...each ingredient has been used for thousands of years to treat a variety of ailments from stomach cramps to throat infections.

In his article for BBC URDU, Wussat Ullah Khan mentions the opening of the first Indian restaurant in London – Hindustan Coffee House – in 1773, which was owned by Deen Muhammad of Patna. He suggests that it was around this time that curry gained popularity in Britain. By 1780, it was commercially available in powder form.

In Canada today, packaged food might just be the best way to introduce South Asian cuisine to curry virgins. After all, that’s how people, both within and beyond the South Asian diaspora, want it to be: convenient, reasonably priced, and somewhat authentic. Perhaps this is the major reason why a vast majority of Canadians are only familiar with the powdered form of curry.

To return to my friend and I, it took us a long, cold winter to realize that the beauty of good food lies not only in how it looks and tastes, but also in the effort and time that has been invested in the preparation. You can’t escape the conclusion that a good curry has to be made from scratch.