Ten Curries, Ten Stories

Old Thai verse includes a genre of poems in praise of food, and one such poem is said to name แกงมัสมั่น (gaeng massaman). That the dish appears by name in courtly poetry is taken as a sign of how long it has been known. The name massaman is widely held to be a corruption of a Persian word for ‘Muslim.’ In the era when Persians served at the Ayutthaya court, spice use is said to have traveled along with trade.

The oldest confirmed recipe on record dates to 1889, in a cookbook by Lady Plean Phatsakorawong. This dish had already been set down in writing by one of the founders of Thai cookbook publishing.

What sets it apart from other Thai curries is dried spice. Cardamom, cinnamon, clove, star anise, cumin. Where most curries build around fresh aromatics like lemongrass and galangal, massaman alone layers in the fragrance of dry-roasted spice. The spice trade that crossed the sea left its mark not only on the name, but on what is in the pot.

The Thai name is gaeng kiao wan. Kiao means green; wan means sweet. But this ‘sweet’ has nothing to do with sugar, it describes a color. In Thai, a bright, soft shade is called a ‘sweet color.’ Translate the name literally, expect a ‘sweet curry,’ and take a bite, what meets you is the sharp heat of fresh green chili.

Its history is more recent than its name suggests. It is absent from the major cookbooks of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it does not appear in the record until sometime in the 20th century. It is made by grinding fresh chilies and herbs into a green paste, then frying it in coconut cream. Where massaman is built on dried spice, this is its opposite, a curry of fresh, raw aromatics.

The bones of the story go like this. Tandoori chicken, grilled in a clay tandoor oven, dries out as time passes. Simmering that dried meat back to life in a sauce of tomato and butter is said to be how the dish began, Butter Chicken, the story goes, was born less from invention than from reviving what had not sold. The setting was Moti Mahal in Delhi, a restaurant run by cooks who had relocated during the Partition of India and Pakistan.

But when, and by whom, is not settled. Even within the founding family, a 1920s Peshawar-origin account and a post-1947 Delhi-origin account exist side by side, and in January 2024, Moti Mahal filed suit against another restaurant chain in the Delhi High Court over the right to call itself the inventor of butter chicken. As of this page's research (2024), no resolution had been confirmed. A single curry has grown large enough that its credit is now fought over in court.

On April 19, 2001, Britain's Foreign Secretary Robin Cook called chicken tikka masala ‘a true British national dish’ in a speech. He chose a dish that had come from elsewhere to speak about Britishness, his point was that a dish brought by immigrants and reshaped to British taste was itself a mirror of Britain as it now was.

Its origin has more than one telling. The most widely known credits the Glasgow restaurant Shish Mahal, where the Pakistani-born chef Ali Ahmed Aslam is said to have dressed grilled chicken in a tomato sauce at a customer's request. But some researchers point to a very similar recipe in an Indian cookbook published in 1961, before that restaurant even opened, and no single inventor has been established. In 2009, a motion seeking official recognition of the Glasgow origin was put before the UK Parliament, and it went nowhere. Without anyone settling whose it is, everyone eats it. That is where this dish stands today.

Japanese curry did not come directly from India. Britain translated the Indian dish into its own idiom first, thickening it with flour, replacing its spice work with a ready-made curry powder, and that British version entered Japan in the Meiji era, where it was translated a second time. The oldest surviving record is a cookbook from 1872 (Meiji 5), which lists it as a Western dish.

It appears early in military cooking manuals too, the Navy's 1908 Reference Book of Naval Culinary Techniques, the Army's Military Cooking Methods, established in 1910. The recipes are there, without question. But the widely repeated story that the Navy spread curry as a defense against beriberi has been questioned by recent food-history research working from primary sources, and this page does not assert that causal story. What is certain is that the recipes existed, and what followed. The company says it began mass-producing domestic curry powder in 1923; after the war, curry became a school-lunch staple, and in 1968 a retort-pouch curry went on sale for home use, the world's first, according to the maker. A translated dish went on to make an industrial history of its own in Japan.

Rendang belongs to the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra. Beef is cooked for a long time in coconut milk and a spice paste, until every trace of liquid is gone. Before refrigeration, this was a technique of preservation. The Minangkabau have a custom called merantau, in which the young leave home to make their way elsewhere, and meat cooked dry, the story goes, was food that could travel with them.

It is worth being upfront about one debate: with no liquid left, can this even be called a curry? Rendang is an endpoint of simmering, stop partway and it is closer to a curry with sauce; carry it all the way through and it becomes a dry, preserved food. It sits on that boundary. In 2013, Indonesia's Ministry of Education and Culture designated it a national intangible cultural heritage. It is often written that rendang holds UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage status, but as of November 2024, it had not yet been inscribed. The government is at the stage of working toward that registration.

The name vindaloo comes from the Portuguese dish carne de vinha d'alhos, meat preserved by marinating it in wine vinegar and garlic. Vinha d'alhos, heard by Goan ears, became ‘vindaloo.’ It is a dish carried in by roughly 450 years of Portuguese rule, beginning when Portugal reached Goa in 1510.

Goan cooks remade it. In place of wine vinegar, which was not to be had, they used palm vinegar, and added chili. That chili had itself been carried to Asia by Portuguese ships from the New World. So folded into this one dish are a Portuguese preserved food, Goan palm vinegar, and New World chili, the entire shipping routes of the Age of Discovery, compressed into a pot. Its remaking, in postwar British curry houses, into shorthand for ‘the hottest curry there is’ was yet another translation, later still.

Herta Heuwer ran a small stall in occupied West Berlin. On September 4, 1949, she began selling grilled sausage topped with a sauce she made by combining ketchup and curry powder. The ingredients, the story goes, were products of the occupation itself, curry powder and Worcestershire sauce from British soldiers, ketchup from American ones. The black market of a defeated city was this dish's kitchen.

Heuwer named her sauce ‘Chillup,’ and according to the records of the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, she filed to trademark it in 1958 and registered it in 1959 (registration no. 721319). A date of invention, an inventor's name, a registration on file with a public authority, as told by the German Patent and Trade Mark Office, this Berlin origin story is the most specific of the ten. Separate accounts also credit Hamburg or Duisburg as the birthplace; the more accurate statement is that it is Berlin's story that is the one commemorated. At Kaiser-Friedrich-Straße 59 in Berlin, a plaque marks the spot in her memory.

Bunny chow is a dish made by hollowing out a loaf of white bread and pouring curry into it. It was born in Durban, in the land the roughly 150,000 indentured laborers from India crossed the sea for, between 1860 and 1911, to work the sugar-cane plantations of the British colony of Natal.

At least four tellings of its origin exist, and none is conclusive. One holds that Indian merchants devised it for takeaway customers. Another holds that it was a workaround for customers who, in an era of racial segregation, could not eat inside the shop. Another traces it to golf caddies needing a way to eat lunch without cutlery. Another has it as a vessel for eating during short breaks on the plantations. Some tellings tie it to conditions under racial segregation that kept people from using tableware; others explain it through the convenience of takeaway or outdoor eating. What they share is the result, that bread itself became the bowl. The name is said to come from ‘Banian,’ a Gujarati merchant caste. Its origin is said to date to the 1940s, shortly before apartheid was formalised in 1948.

The Caribbean had no precedent for curry technique. To fill the plantation labor gap left by the abolition of slavery, Britain sent indentured laborers from India to the Caribbean between 1838 and 1917. By the recorded numbers: roughly 240,000 to Guyana, roughly 140,000 to Trinidad, roughly 36,000 to Jamaica. The record of this migration was inscribed on UNESCO's Memory of the World register in 2011. Curry goat grew out of the technique those people carried with them.

What is interesting is how the spice itself changed on arrival. Jamaican curry powder kept turmeric at its core but folded in allspice, native to the Caribbean, an aroma with no place in Indian blends. In Trinidad, amchar, a green-mango pickling spice, was added, preserving a technique closer to the homeland. On every island, curry goat is spoken of as a dish for celebrations.