37
quotes this as a fact and supports it with a reference to the accounts of
a Dutch traveller in 1598 referring to a dish called
‘carriel’
. He also re-
fers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called
Atre do Cozinha
, with chilli–based curry powder called
‘caril’.
In her ’50 Great Curries of India’ Camellia Panjabi says the word today
simply means ‘gravy’! She also goes for the Tamil word ‘
kaari or kaaree’
as the origin, but with some reservation, noting in the North, where the
English first landed in 1608, a gravy dish is called
’khadi
’.
Pat Chapman, of the Curry Club fame offers several possibilities:
‘karahi or karai
(Hindi) from the wok-shaped cooking dish,
‘kari’
from
the Tamil or
‘Turkuri’
a seasonal sauce or stew.
The one thing they all seem to agree on is the word originates from In-
dia and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj. On closer inspec-
tion however there is just as much evidence to suggest that the word
was English all along.
In the time of Richard I (1189 – 99 ‘Lion Heart’) there was a revolution
in English cooking. In the better-off kitchens, cooks were regularly us-
ing ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, galingale, cubebs, coriander,
cumin, cardamom, and aniseed resulting in highly spiced cooking very
similar to India. They also had a
‘powder fort
, a ‘
powder douce
’ and a
‘powder blanche’
.
Then in Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery
book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others
including philosophers produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390
called ‘The Forme of Cury’. Cury was the Old English word for cook-
ing derived from the French
‘cuire’
to cook, boil, grill; hence cuisine.
So when English merchants landed in Surat in 1608, then Calcutta in
1633, Madras 1640, Bombay 1668, the word ‘
cury’
had been part of the
English language for well over 200 hundred years. It was noted from
Emperor Jahangir’s kitchens that
dumpukht
fowl stewed in butter with
spices, almond and raisins and served to the merchants in 1612, was
very similar to the recipe for English Chicken Pie in a popular cookery
book of the time ‘The English Hus-wife’ by Gervase Markham. Indeed
many spices had been in Europe for hundreds of years by then, after
