A curry is any of a great variety of distinctively spiced dishes, best-known in Indian, Thai and other South Asian cuisines, but curry has been adopted into all of the mainstream cuisines of the Asia-Pacific area. Along with tea, curry is one of the few dishes or drinks that is truly "pan-Asian", but specifically, its roots come from India. Curry was later brought to the West by British colonialists in India from the 18th century.

Curries around the world

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The term curry is derived from kari, (a Tamil word meaning sauce and referring to various kinds of dishes common in South India made with vegetables or meat and usually eaten with rice). ^* However, the term (meaning a stew) is found in English before the arrival of British traders on the Subcontinent, and may simply have been applied by them to dishes which they thought resembled the stews they were used to. Nowadays the term is used more broadly, especially in the Western Hemisphere, to refer to almost any spiced, sauce-based dishes cooked in various south and southeast Asian styles. This imprecise umbrella term is largely a legacy of the British Raj. There is a common misconception that all curries are made from curry powder or that a certain meat or vegetable is curried. In India, the word curry is in fact rarely used. Most dishes involving lentils are called dahl, or else are referred to by a name specific to the spices used in the preparation. Meat or vegetable dishes are likewise given specific names that indicate the method of cooking, or the particular spices used. There is, however, a particular north Indian and Pakistani dish which is given the name curry or khadi - this involves yoghurt, ghee and besan (see below).

Tamil cuisine

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