Curry

Thai is my favourite of the curries, and I think the reason is that it has the most internal logic of any of them — once you see the system, every paste on the shelf explains itself. But the word on the front of all of it turns out to be the least reliable thing in the whole subject. “Curry” is a European word for a category the people cooking it did not have, it was Portuguese before it was British, and the first English curry recipe has neither turmeric nor chili in it. What I did not expect was how much of the modern story runs through one 1784 newspaper advertisement for a powder sold in a perfumery, pitched as medicine, and built from the start to survive a sea voyage. That tin is why there is curry in Tokyo, in Trinidad and in Berlin. This is fifteen pages on all of it — the history, the spices, the Thai system paste by paste, India, Japan, the world tour, what to buy, how to pound your own, and what is actually happening in the pan.