On the one hand, the “Jurassic Park” dream of cloning dinosaurs based on miraculously preserved DNA has not yet become a reality. But on the other hand, today’s scientists are cooking up something almost as good and much less likely to wreak havoc on a remote island: They can recreate curry dishes that people prepared in Asia more than four millennia ago.
Scientists are uncovering the prehistory of curry at multiple research sites in South and Southeast Asia. In 2010, archaeologists working near Delhi, India were able to scrape molecules from shards of 4,500-year-old cooking pots that suggested the presence of eggplant, ginger, turmeric and garlic. Together, these ingredients look a lot like an eggplant curry, courtesy of the Indus civilization. Then in 2016, a separate group of scientists announced the discovery of 2,000-year-old spices – including ginger, cloves, turmeric and nutmeg – on stone cookware at a site in Vietnam. Not only that, the nutmeg was still fragrant.
These findings give archaeologists and historians a better understanding of how both people and spices traveled in ancient times, and shed further light on the global history of ‘curry’ – a complicated name for a deliciously complicated dish. For example, the cooking utensils at the Vietnamese site were believed to have come from South Asia, suggesting that people traveled from there via the Indian Ocean to the southeastern part of the continent, bringing with them curry and cooking utensils.
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Curry has a very long, very complicated history
traditional curry spices in wooden bowls – Tara Abdillah/Shutterstock
One thing scientists studying the Vietnamese site noticed was that the flavors of the 2,000-year-old curry were very similar to the flavors you might find there today, combining components of curry powders from India, such as turmeric, with local ingredients such as galangal. Furthermore, the similarities between today’s Vietnamese curries and Indian curries lend credence to the idea that curry as we know it today originated in India and spread from there.
That said, ‘curry’ is both a complicated concept and a relatively recent invention. It dates back to the 17th century, when Portuguese settlers in India encountered ‘kari’, a Tamil word referring to spicy stew with rice. They brought the word back to Europe, where it was adapted into English as ‘curry’ and then applied to all kinds of spicy dishes encountered by colonists in Asia, despite the fact that ‘curry’ looks very different between India, Thailand, Malaysia , Japan and elsewhere. Even today, the word is sometimes used by Westerners to describe dishes that aren’t actually curries at all, like butter chicken recipes, for example.
Despite the persistence of many types of curry around the world today, the word is sometimes seen as a colonial relic ill-suited to describing a whole panoply of culinary preparations from a wide range of places and traditions. Whatever you want to call it, ‘curry’ was clearly a thing in South Asia long before the Europeans showed up – about four millennia earlier, as we now know.
Read the original article on Mashed.
