Episode notes
Curry feels ancient, but for most of history Indian food had no chili heat at all, because chili peppers did not exist in Asia. This episode traces a 4,500-year journey that begins with mortars and pestles at Mohenjo-daro, where starch grain analysis shows cooks grinding ginger, garlic and turmeric around 2600 BCE. Early cooks got their heat from black pepper and long pepper and their savory depth from asafoetida.
We follow the Portuguese to Goa in 1510, where they brought chili peppers from the Americas and took the Tamil word kari into their own language. The British then turned hundreds of regional dishes into one generic curry and a shelf-stable yellow powder. From there we cover the sweet, roux-thickened curry of the Japanese navy, bunny chow born in Durban under apartheid, and Britain's 12,000 Bangladeshi-run curry houses with their korma-to-phaal heat scale.
- Why chili heat reached India only through the Columbian exchange
- How asafoetida works as a savory umami base once it is fried
- How British colonial rule produced curry powder and Hannah Glasse's 1747 recipe
- Japanese navy curry, beriberi, and the sweet apple-and-honey style
- Bunny chow, the vindaloo's Portuguese roots, and chicken tikka masala as a British national dish