Curry Before Columbus

I have a confession to make: I can’t eat spicy food.

As a person of South Asian descent, it’s incongruous, I know. I’m left adrift with the certain type of person who orders food Indian spicy. While my dining companions make an effort to signal their identity as capsaicin-consuming, I wonder if I should order my food white-guy mild. It’s not like I don’t enjoy the stinging heat or the bleary-eyed trip of something made extra hot—it’s just that I can’t digest it.

Sir Joseph Paxton, “Capsicum ustulatum,” Paxton’s Magazine of Botany and Register of Flowering Plants, 1838.

I blame dysentery. A bout of it when I was three left two lasting effects on my life: it introduced me to my oldest friendship through a circuitous game of chance (a story for another time), and it rendered my digestive system subject to pains that feel like someone is reaching into me to wring out my guts like wet laundry.

I’m often told by well-meaning people how much they love Indian food, and then asked if I cook it at home. I never know quite how to respond. Does roti count—especially if it’s the buss-up shut parāthā of Trinidad? Where do Bihari staples like sattū (ground-up roasted gram) or chōkha (mashed and roasted eggplant) fit into this understanding? But their question isn’t an interrogation of the narrowness of national cuisines. Their question isn’t a question at all—it’s a chance to share. The woman who loves her corner Indian restaurant. The man who just took an Indian-cooking class through adult education. The reasons are usually the same: they love the heat, the fieriness, the spice.

All the things I’m doomed to avoid.

Ghiyas al-Din watches the process of cooking green vegetables. British Library IO Islamic 149, f.79v.

This all had me wondering: what’s Indian food without the heat? The historian in me has an answer: spiciness is historically contingent. In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue and the entire world changed: slavery, war, disease, colonization, and an immense transfer of wealth to Europe. And with that wealth too came New World nightshades—potatoes, tomatoes, tobacco, peppers of all kinds. It took some time for these fruits and vegetables to plant themselves into European cuisine. The tomato, for example, wasn’t widely used in Italian cuisine until the eighteenth century.¹ But what about food further out from Europe? What about India?

Soon after Columbus’ first expedition, the treaties of Tordesillas and Saragossa divided the oceans of the newly-known world. The Portuguese effectively took the Atlantic and Indian oceans, while the Spanish took the Pacific. With that, the Portuguese established forts and trading posts along India’s Malabar coast. In time, aloo (potato), tamātar (tomato), and mirchī (chilies) were available on the western coast of the Indian subcontinent. Later, the English set up their first trading posts in India in the eastern Gangetic plain, bringing these same staples into North India.²

So what was curry like before Columbus? Well, curry didn’t exist.

In these cases, I find it useful to consult my Hobson-Jobson, the nineteenth-century dictionary of Anglo-Indian loan words. According to that source, curry comes from the Portuguese word karil (caril) via the Tamil word kari (sauce, relish for rice). In the sixteenth century, this was transliterated into English as caril, but by the 1680s entered English as carrees, perhaps from caris, an Anglicized plural form of the Portuguese.³ It’s a circle: I’m back to Tordesillas and Saragossa.

It looks like the curry too came after Columbus. And not only that: it’s a meaningless word in the context of daily life. Indian food is cipher, built upon a matrix of regionalism, religion, and caste. A Dalit from Mararashtra’s Marathwada region might mix bovine blood with yesur (a local spice mix) to make lakuti, while a Tamil Brahmin might mix eight spices with tur dāl and onions to make a sambar.⁴ Beyond the hyper-regionalism is a blunt truth as well: there are actual words for the plethora of regional dishes that can be reduced to a curry.

Still, curry can be a somewhat useful concept. It’s an outsider’s perspective, a shorthand glossing over an entire subcontinent’s worth of food. It’s the type of concept that takes what it wants from the original, and mixes in whatever else is ready-to-hand.

I went to the source: the first example of a curry recipe found in a Western cookbook. Hannah Glasse’s 1747 bestseller, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy, featured a recipe “To make a Currey the Indian way” alongside one “To make a Pellow the Indian way.”⁵

Upon first glance, I can’t tell how this recipe differs from a fricasseed chicken. But it’s there: “an ounce of Turmerick [turmeric], a large spoonful of ginger and beaten pepper.” What makes this curry in an Indian way is not the chicken or the cream, but these three spices taken mixed together and served.

Before spicy came spice: the history of curry before Columbus is a history of spice. And so I wonder: what spices were used? In what quantities?

The best spice to help answer these questions might be asafetida (also spelled asafoetida). Known in Hindi as hīng, it’s the dried resin taken from the root of the Ferula herb, and is used throughout Indian cuisine in nearly all Indian regions. When fried in oil, it adds a lovely umami flavor to any dish, one reminiscent of garlic or onions.

I’ve also known it as an extremely smelly spice.

William Woodville, “Ferula assa-foetida,” Medical Botany, vol. 1 (1790).

I had never heard of it until I was an adult. Family lore says that my father hated the smell so much, he told my mother early in their marriage to keep it out of the spice cabinet forever. But it wasn’t just him—the smell has a noxious reputation across the world, going back centuries. The Portuguese physician and naturalist Garcia de Orta wrote in his sixteenth-century Colóquios that “the nastiest smell in the world for me is Assa-fetida [sic].” But he also wrote that “the thing most used throughout India, and in all parts of it, is that Assa-fetida.”⁶

This was as true in the twelfth century as it was in the sixteenth. One of the earliest South Asian texts that featured non-medicinal recipes was the Sanskrit Mānasollāsa. Written in 1129 CE by Someshvara III, king of the Western Chalukya Empire in the western Deccan and South India, the book is an encyclopedic treatise on all aspects of life in his kingdom. One of those most common ingredients found in its chapter on the enjoyment of food is asafetida.⁷

For example, his general practices or preparing meat dishes called for the following:

For getting good smell, dry coriander seeds, jeera, and hingu; for giving colour haridra; for good taste the powder of saindhvam, visvamarichim are sprinkled over the food and covered with a clean cloth and mixed slightly with oil.⁸

Various other recipes, including those for dāl, meat dishes, and fish were also spiced with asafetida. My first inclination when I saw this was to question it: of course a king would spice his food. Spices were a luxury, and it goes without saying that a king could afford to command his kitchen to use whatever spices were available to him.

“Abu’l-Fazl presenting the Akbarnama to Emperor Akbar,” Mughal miniature, Govardhan, 1603–1605.

But a century prior to the publication of the Mānasollāsa came the Lokopakara (roughly translates to “For the benefit of the people”). Written in 1025 by the Jain scholar Chavundaraya II, the Lokopakara featured a section on cooking with a recipe for dāl that recommended a garnish of mustard, cumin seeds, asafetida, and curry leaves.⁹

Asafetida too made an appearance in recipes dating from the Sultanate era. From 1206 to 1526, a succession of Islamic dynasties known as the Delhi Sultanate ruled northern India. Nasir ud-Din Shah, a ruler of the Malwa Sultanate (a breakaway state from one of the Delhi Sultanate dynasties) produced the Ni’matnama (“The Book of Delights”). The book contained some of the recipes loved by his father, the Sultan Ghiyath Shah. Interestingly enough, the book contains a handful of recipes considered rustic or common—food for the common folk.

One recommends to:

take root vegetables and boil them well, then take them off and fry them in ghee flavoured with sesame and asafetida.

Add lime juice, salt and burned vegetable oil and mix it as explained above. Take some of it, flavor it and cook it.¹⁰

I’m not sure how burned vegetable oil would taste, but I’m sure the asafetida would make up for it. Maybe.

Humble hīng too made an appearance in the royal accounts of the Mughals. The Mughal Emperor Akbar reigned from 1556 to 1605. His court historian, Abu’l-Fazl ‘Allami, dutifully chronicled his reign in Ain-i-Akbari (“Administration of Akbar”). The work remains a quintessential source for the workings of Akbar’s government. It also contains a repertoire of recipes. For example, a recipe for bādinjān (eggplant) asks for:

10 s. [sīr, approximately 640 grams] rice; 1 ½ s. g’hí [ghee], 3 ¾ s. onions; ¼ s. ginger and lime juice; pepper and coriander seed, 5 m. [misqal, approximately 6 grams] of each; cloves, cardamums [cardamom], and assafoetida, each ½ m.¹¹

Strangely enough, the recipe for eggplant lacks any mention of eggplant. But regardless, there it is: a half misqal of asafetida.¹² Even the kitchens of the Mughal court were filled with the wondrous odors of hīng.

The history of curry before Columbus is truly a history of spice. There are, of course, more spices to find in the archives: turmeric, coriander, and cumin come to mind. These are spices that cross region and class, the staples thrown into the pot in meal after meal. But ubiquitous, smelly, resinous hīng gives a chance to take a peek into the flavors of Indian food prior to the Columbian exchange. Perhaps there should be a new way to order something, not Indian spicy, but Indian spiced, with plenty of asafetida. I’ll hold my nose and ask for a generous portion, just like all those food chroniclers over the past millennium.

1. David Gentilecore, Pomodoro! A History of the Tomato in Italy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 45–68.
2. K.T. Achaya, Indian Food: A Historical Companion (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 225–27.
3. Sir Henry Yule, “Curry,” in Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial Anglo-Indian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive, ed. William Crooke (London: J Murray, 1903), 281.
4. Shahu Patole, “Why I Wrote a Book on Dalit Food,” Express Foodie, Sept. 10, 2016.
5. Hannah Glasse, The Art of Cookery, New (London: L. Wangford, 1777), 74.
6. Garcia da Orta, Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India, ed. Conde de Ficalho, trans. Sir Clements Markham, (London: Henry Sotheran and Co., 1913), 44–45.
7. Colleen Taylor Sen, Feasts and Fasts: A History of Food in India (London: Reaktion Books, 2015), chap. 7.
8. P. Arundhati, trans., Royal Life in Mānasôllāsa (New Delhi: Sundeep Prakashan, 1994), 120.
9. Sen, Feasts and Fasts, chap. 7.
10. Norah M. Titley, ed., The Ni’matnama Manuscript of the Sultans of Mandu: The Sultan’s Book of Delights (London: Routledge, 2004), 44–45.
11. Abu’l-Fazl ’Allami, The Ain I Akbari, trans. Henry Blochmann, vol. 1 (Calcutta: Rouse, 1873), 59.
12. A unit of mass equal to 4.25 grams. Misqal is sometimes written as mithqāl.

Nishant Batsha

Nishant Batsha is a writer of fiction and histories. His writing has previously appeared in Narrative, TriQuarterly, and The Believer, among others. He is currently revising his debut novel.