How an Indian Stew Shaped the Modern World: From Cleopatra to Queen Elizabeth

in 2017 after exhaustive surveys and interviews with chefs and journalists CNN released a list of the world's best foods and coming in at number one was a dry beef Curry called renang from Sumatra in Indonesia 4 years later the network did it again and again the winner was a curry this time from Thailand the legendary chicken Mamon the two best foods in the world two curries and that doesn't even scratch the surface of this beloved category from Japan to Jamaica West Africa to the Middle East German sausages to Queen Elizabeth's coronation Curry is an obsession but it's also a category that's become so broad so political and so controversial that to some even the use of the term is deeply offensive today we're diving into the ancient history of what we now call Curry the ingredients and techniques that would define a cuisine and how a simple stew would Inspire Caesar's conquests help set off the Crusades trigger the Age of Exploration and change the world [Music] forever in 1964 the United States Supreme Court heard a case about obscene content in the end one of the justices would write that famous line which was more or less I can't Define it but I know it when I see it that's kind of like a curry and here in a massive Thailand food court well I see it all around this is a place called mere it's a brand new shopping mall in downtown Bangkok and here a half dozen stories are packed with Michelin Street carts upscale takeaway stalls and not one but two restaurants by Gordon ramsy but even with all that it's all about the cow gang the Tha Curry counters where the Bounty of this amazing country the colors and textures and smells sit on full display all throughout the Kingdom from shopping malls to Street Markets cafeteras to home kitchens cow gang counters are one of the most picturesque sites to be found the magic of Thai Cuisine laid out on a table thousands of years of History his showcased in the diversity of the curries and it is diverse the category of tha Curry involves dishes as completely different as hung Le rich in Savory brought from Myanmar by the ethnic M green curry invented in Bangkok in the 20th century hok esteemed Curry moose with connections to the ancient cim and javanes and even Curry Puffs deep fried pastries with their own origins in Portugal they're really is no unifying anything in all these dishes that fall under the umbrella of Curry but even if we can't Define it we know it when we see it Curry is an impossibly broad category and on the surface there's not much that all these things have in common they use different spices different proteins they come in different colors and flavors and textures but maybe that's actually the point all right let's start at the very beginning [Music] it's the year 2600 BC and someone in the indis valley is hungry so in a mortar and pestle they combine cumin Mustard Seed fennel saffron and Tamarind a simple Act of food preparation that maybe didn't feel important at the time but it's the first example we've ever discovered of someone going through the trouble to prepare a blend of ingredients not for sustenance not for health but just to add Flavor now it's important for this story to understand the context of where this was actually discovered see this first spice blend was found on shards of pottery at the site of an ancient city called moeno daro which was here a place that at the time the cook was alive was the largest city in the entire world moeno daro was the heart of the so-called heraa civilization which starting around 3300 BC for a little bit more than a millennia would reain from the indis Valley of today's Pakistan as perhaps the most advanced Society Humanity had ever seen 2,000 years before ancient Rome heraa cities had irrigation drainage and buildings made from brick herens smelted Metals into tools and cooking pots and wrote in a language so complex that we still can't figure it out today at its peak there were multiple cities of up to 60,000 people it was dense and urban and the crazy thing is the civilization fell apart so quickly that the haraa would be completely forgotten and its Secrets would stay buried until the 19th century now how the haroen civilization was finally uncovered is a story that's not really relevant to this but I'm going to tell it anyway because it's amazing according to the history texts haraa was found by an archaeologist named Charles massan he's credited as being the man who uncovered the ruins of mohenjo daro and a dozen other ancient sites and he published his findings in 1842 but what's interesting is the fact that he was not an archaeologist or a historian and his name wasn't even Charles Masson it was James Lewis and he was a wanted criminal a deserter from the English army who would in the end spend eight years in hiding as what I guess you could call Modern history's first ever Backpacker slumming it from place to place across today's India Pakistan and Afghanistan before running out of money hitching a ride on a boat to Persia walking into a British government office pretending to be an American archaeologist and securing financing from the same people who had a warrant out for his arrest to let him keep traveling and that's how he happened to discover haraa anyway it would take another Century for real research to be done into the civilization and it's only in the 2000s when we've really begun to understand their impact on Cuisine the founders of Curry in 2010 a few years after the discovery of that first spice blend scientists from Vancouver made another find in another heraa city here it was the leftovers of a cooked stew made with eggplant Ginger and turmeric and there were other finds herens were cooking with lentils and chickpeas mango used both fresh and dried as a seasoning sugar cane salt basil and cooking oil made from Sesame and of course the original spices from that Old mortar and PE hessle and each example of these spices found was used in different combinations different proportions seasoning and spices meant to suit individual dishes now this was quite a breakthrough this was the first time we find an example of what would become the foundation of Indian and Thai cuisine the technique of grinding spices and using them as the base of a stew and again the haroen civilization was much more advanced than we expected they weren't just making spice pastes but they were frying them in sesame oil and as implements they were cooking meat and bread in Tandoori ovens and simmering their stews in pots called hondes still in use for the same purpose today so for our first meal of the day as we try to understand Curry or we're going to the indis valley so if you've been watching since we started this channel you will recognize the orange colored walls behind me because we have filmed here several times in fact when we first uh launched this was in like three of our three of our first four or five videos that we came here uh for Miss salot and Curry um this is a restaurant in uh kind of a Punjabi part of Bangkok which is the food of the region where the very first spice blend was ever uh ground into a paste or powder and then made into what we now call a curry [Music] to dat the region once called haraa lies in the country of Pakistan in the northern part of a place known as Punjab Punjab is a region that includes the indis valley and until the present it was one of the world's most famous culinary regions now this is not a haraa restaurant I mean that doesn't exist but it is what I consider the best Punjabi place in Bangkok right in the heart of pahat the city's North Indian quarter and while modern Punjabi curries might not exactly resemble the food of the ancient Harens well maybe it hasn't changed as much as you think here we've ordered two staple Punjabi dishes both of which showcase some ingredients unknown to herens but techniques and seasonings that call back to what those first archaeologists found these are the ingredients in the these two dishes compared to the stuff found utilized by The [Music] Harens I love this place taste like history [Music] okay we need to keep moving through the story but first let's put those ingredient lists back up on the screen for just a second see that one thing with the asterisk garam misala now ultimately that's what this is all really about and the foundation of what would come to be known as Curry a masala is literally a spice blend that's it that's all it is a blend of spice is meant to complement a certain recipe is called the Masala for that dish you can't necessarily say the harapin created the first curries as that's a term that's kind of meaningless as we'll get to later but they did make what we consider to be the first malalad and that's just as important to this story today if you don't have time to make your own Masala for each part of a family dinner that's okay you can just pick some up at the store even here in Bangkok we didn't have to look far to find a place Place selling Masala is meant to go with anything and once again even with modern mass-produced boxes we can still see a striking similarity to the spice blends of the indis [Music] [Music] valley [Music] now the fact that the haroen civilization is all but forgotten is actually closely related to the reason why they had such a massive impact on Modern Cuisine see haraa was never conquered they didn't get absorbed or enslaved into some neighboring Kingdom what happened 4,000 years ago the reason why they disappeared was that the indis valley went dry the river stopped flowing the farmland land died and the people simply scattered abandoning the greatest cities the world had ever seen but wherever they'd end up moving north south east and west they'd bring their technique of using spices and aromatics ground into a paste or powder and then cooked into a stew and they'd set out to acquire more spices for their masalas kicking off the very beginning of thousands of years of the spice economy so that's where we go next we follow the masalas out of the indust Valley and our first stop is a place that was for a thousand years before The Harens the crossroads of the ancient world a place that was just emerging under hamurabi as the kingdom of Babylon a culture that after discovering Indian spices would become the next great civilization and the first to dominate the global spice trade today we call it the country of Iraq this is is like you see how how happy I am but this is really exciting um so we have mutton Curry and um let's taste it by itself first yeah I'm going to try it by itself first I can see already just looking at an onion I see cilantro I see uh light green chili which is which is this so just a couple slices of that in here but it's not going to be spicy Iraqi Cuisine is not a spicy Cuisine turn the camera this is this is just amazingly [Music] [Music] good [Music] [Music] the food here the Iraqi curries we were lucky enough to get to try are absolutely fascinating and it's worth mentioning that the oldest written recipe ever discovered ever in the entire world was basically this a haroen style stew with North Indian spices carved into clay 3700 years ago and even though some of the ingredients are newer and some of the flavors have certainly changed both of these dishes have history this one said to have been the favorite food of the Prophet Muhammad [Music] all right I want you to look at a map of where Iraq is and in the old days where the Babylonian kingdom was right at the Gateway to the Arabian Peninsula close by land to Egypt and pretty much the Midway point between India and the states of the Mediterranean that is obviously significant because once the descendants of the harapin found their way to Babylon either through migration or through trade the Babylonian and later Assyrian and Persian kingdoms would become the biggest trading partner of the Indians buying spices to resell further to the West they'd basically build a monopoly for a thousand years cornering the Red Sea and European market for spices and they were very good at it those were the years when spices from India in the Middle East commanded prices that would raised their stature to something only meant for Nobles or the richest of the rich when the Arab Traders concocted wild stories about these mysterious and delectable plants to explain why the prices were so high it was said that cassia grew in Shallow Lakes patrolled by dragons that black pepper came from fiery caves cumin from snake infested waters and cinnamon well that was protected by a bird called and I'm not kidding the cinus and the Arabs did a whole lot more than just cornered the market in Indian spices they became a One-Stop shop for the ancient world they established a trading relationship by water with southeast Asia especially the island of Sumatra adding to their portfolio things like cloves nutmeg and mace Overland from the Mediterranean came bay leaves and fenu Greek introduced for the first time to India via Arab Merchants the Heyday of the Arab spice trade would end abruptly in the year 120 that was when a Shipwrecked Indian sailor ended up in Egypt he drew a map for the Egyptians giving them directions on how to visit India directly without a middleman and thus would be born the new megalopolis of Alexandria but we'll get to that part a little bit later for now let's go back to the spread of the heren stews from the indis [Music] valley all right let me make one thing clear just because the haroen developed a technique of making spice Blends doesn't mean they could use those in every single meal and that of course is because there were limits on Bronze Age agriculture see 4,500 years ago there were no tesos or city supers to buy what you needed and spices and herbs in most places were generally foraged but as trade increased with the Arab world Indian Farmers made advances in growing commercial quantities of spices from black pepper to turmeric and ginger and these became available across the subcontinent and then the real step forward came around 300 BC with the Moran empire under Shandra Gupta the morans cultivated four types of cardamons dried and sold six types of salts as well as Ginger cumin long pepper and most importantly they also began to grow the spices imported from abroad cloves nutmeg and bay leaves around the 1st Century BC a new civilization would appear in and around the indust Valley the cusan which we don't know very much about from a food standpoint but for the purpose of this story it is worth mentioning that you've heard of them on this channel before that's because the kusan were the ones who we know from archaeological evidence had a presence in abisinia today's Ethiopia around that time we start to see the immediate and heavy use of Indian spices Around the Horn of Africa and African ingredients sent East stuff like okra which we ate in our first meal and most importantly coriander now an intrinsic part of Indian masalas in fact Ethiopia would be one of the first countries to adapt their own version of a masala as the foundation of their own Cuisine with evidence found as long ago as the 300s a their blend would be called Barber and here's how closely it resembles garam [Music] masalah [Music] over the first few centuries after the fall of harappa we can see a clear path where their Cuisine would influence local tastes and flavors and we can also see clear lines that separate Indian influence from other ancient powers like China this is one of those lines it's the mountain range called the Himalayas and to the northeast of that line food looks completely different but to the south of that enormous natural barrier we find misales and stews as the foundation of Cuisines such as North Indian nepes and the northern gateway to Southeast Asia Bengal or [Music] Bangladesh this is a Bangladeshi restaurant serving the food of benal a region that for thousands of years served as the crossroads between every civilization south of the Himalayas not to mention a Lynch pin of the spread of food and culture from the subcontinent to what's now Myanmar in [Music] [Music] Thailand we're talking about countries because that's our frame of reference as you know 2023 almost 2024 we talk about countries this is from Bangladesh but we just had this from you know North India um you know they were talking about how this inspired curries that would you know eventually become part of the cuisine in Myanmar in Northern Thailand these are not countries that existed you know at the time this story starts and even as this is spreading you know uh National borders look very different than they do today so it's just about the spread of people and dishes and techniques and the other interesting thing is when you see that line and where it goes you can very easily see the distinction of well why does Curry go this way but you don't see the technique go here and the answer is because of the Himalayas and because of the desert and it's just that's where people were so there's a huge line of distinction between where you see you know the ancient culinary techniques that sort of have a lot in common versus the things that start to look very different and it's just geographical boundaries because that was what you had you know before you had these National boundaries drawn I mean Bangladesh has been a country since what 1970s you know it was separated from India in 47 um you know throughout history this has all been thrown together in a lot of different kingdoms and Empires and countries and you know so what flag we put on this dish today doesn't matter it's just a matter of tracking this as it moves to the east the interesting thing about benali curries is that these dishes are part of a family that include things that we've showcased before on OTR in fact in just our last video we spent time visiting the ethnic M some of the first inhabitants to the region bordering Bangladesh to the east and their most famous curry hung lay well that's a closely related cousin of both the haroen stews and the Savory dishes of the Himalayas but of course that's not to say that this would be the foundation of today's most famous Southeast Asian curries because there's still one piece missing and to find that we have to look to the [Music] South and finally we introduce the coconut it is well I mean you know what it is and it's impossible to imagine Curry at least as we know it here in Southeast Asia without this key component it's what gives that sweet creaminess to masaman panang and green curry to Malaysian laa Indonesian beef renang or Burmese Ono CA soy and coconut would be the last great addition to India's stews before they'd find their way across the ocean now we don't know when the coconut itself was first introduced to the Indian subcontinent but we do know it was sometime between 600 and 300 BC that was when it was brought to Sri Lanka Tamil Nadu in the Malibar Coast by austronesian Traders ERS the group that spread coconuts from the Philippines to the rest of the world in fact coconut appears to have arrived and become a major part of local cuisine in South India particularly the state of kerola before the indis valley masalas and stews first appear in those records and when that would happen sometime around the 1st Century BC when a culture already making coconut milk cream and powder began to incorporate those techniques into a misala base stew well nothing in this part of the world would ever be the [Music] same it was really interesting seeing earlier the Bengali the Bangladeshi Curry that kind of showed us on the way to being Burmese North Thailand that style but this is fascinating to me because this is what looks like almost looks like a Punjabi Curry Punjabi Curry exactly it looks like that you know it but this is not a Punjabi Curry this something that it's uh South Indian dis this is called K chicken roast I will show with then you can you can have and you can you can taste [Music] yourself South Indian food basically it's come with coconut coconut milk or coconut pow as well and in North Indian uh they didn't mix with coconut at all just but food will be spicy North India and South India food also is spicy North Indian very spicy South Indian not to much but they serve with coconut so you cannot feel too much [Music] spicy [Music] in July of this year a team of archaeologists made an astonishing Discovery at first glance it looked a lot like the finds in mohenjo Doro it was a mortar and pestle or actually more accurately a grinding slab and it contained a blend of spices that are by now probably quite familiar turmeric ginger clove nutmeg and cinnamon but what made this so significant was the fact that this was not found in India it was in Vietnam just west of the meong Delta and it dates as far far back as the 2 to 3rd Century ad this which also included finger root sand Ginger and galangal was the very oldest Masala the oldest base of an Indian inspired stew ever found in Southeast Asia it was found at a site from the fan Kingdom something we've referenced before as one of the first organized settlements ever in this region and a distant predecessor of the Chim and that wasn't all they discovered a DNA analysis shows that around that exact same time migrants from South India arrived and absorbed into fan now that's not to say that all of Southeast Asia's coconut curries would spring from this settlement over the next 2,000 years there would be countless more periods of migration especially to Indonesia and Malaysia where just as a side note Roy Curry also beloved here in Thailand uses a Roy and in some cases a curry literally exactly the same as what we just had at that carala restaurant anyway one last note on the curries of Kerala if you were paying close attention when we showed you those last two recipes you'll notice one ingredient that's specific to the Southwest coast of India something not included in anything else we've tried today or referenced from history and that is curry as a matter of fact the leaves of the curry tree which is this the Maria or bergera kegi ey and we really don't have anything else to say about the curry plant so we'll just move on with a quick synopsis of the next 1,500 years before we can pick up our [Music] story all right I'm going to rush through about 1500 years of the spice trade because this isn't about spices it's about Curry but these are the important points we start after the Egyptians are now trading with India directly that would lead to Egypt and the port city of Alexandria Bec becoming massively wealthy and Powerful which meant everyone wanted a peace Caesar invaded in 47 BC and then over the next 800 years the judeans byzantines Persians Arabs and more would fight over the city and its control of the spice trade tensions between the different groups would explode into a massive regional conflict which would in turn grow into the Holy Wars at the turn of the Millennia better known of course as the Crusades anyway well everyone was busy fighting each other this city state of Venice quietly built a monopoly on global spices and by 1,400 they were shipping 8 metric tons of the stuff just to Western Europe every single day the Portuguese were tired of paying Venetian prices so they wanted their own route to India enter Vasco de Gama who sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and arrived in carola in 1498 Portugal would introduce Chili Peppers to make tomatoes and potatoes which would quickly catch on since in India these were the years of the Mughal Empire they were the kingdom that United the subcontinent and spread Regional dishes across the country turning all of India into a culinary Paradise with things like mugly meats and biryanis available side by side with vegetarian Hindu meals coconut and seafood stews from Caroli and the old indis Valley Staples and then the British arrived and called it all Curry why is the word Curry so loaded I think it's loaded because it tries to simplify an incredibly complex top topic um for instance if we said all Italian food is pizza we would be doing a massive disservice to all of the wonderful nonas and wonderful grandmothers who are there making pasta for centuries this is Keith saris and he's an Indian food historian and Chef who for nearly two decades has split his time between India where he cooks in kitchens and a company's archaeological digs and the United States my background really wasn't Indian it wasn't anything like that it was just French fine dining and you know I discovered Indian food because to be honest I was a really picky eater um my big thing is I didn't want to like get outside this little bubble that I kind of grew up in and so a friend of mine and his family had an Indian restaurant and they would always cook and they'd say oh try this I was like no no no no so one day we were playing a video game and he said if I beat you this round you have to try it and I say all the time it's the best bet I ever lost um that first moment that I tried those flavors it was a dish called chicken vindaloo which is going dish minute I had it it was like I would say it was like you know when when you watch The Matrix and all of a sudden you know like he's like wo like this is what the world is that completely radically changed my life and I became obsessed with trying to figure out how to do it a few months ago Keith made a video on YouTube where he tackled the controversy of the word Curry and since he knows a lot more about it than I do instead of quoting him I asked him to explain it to us directly how did the name Curry come about the name Curry kind of came about because of the taml word Ki and k a r i would be the kind of the English spelling that and that word really kind of embodied a you know a dish that's veg or non veg mixed with some spices typically those spices could be ginger garlic elichi um which is cardamom in Hindi um so things like that so that amalgamation of kind of food ended up becoming what we modernly know as Curry today and of course once the British started hearing that word they would spell it as c r r y um and I think that that that's one of the things to really kind of pay attention to because it was a blanket statement for any dish they didn't understand and going into another culture there's a lot of dishes you're not going to understand now all right here's the thing the idea of using a blanket term for the cuisine of a country as diverse as India is offensive but if we're being completely honest by the standards of the 18th century it's basically a compliment what makes this really problematic is when in the early 17 00s the British started producing a powder a lot like garam masala and calling it curry powder like they're pretty much exactly the same the British version less spicy and heavier on turmeric gar Masala more complex and flavorful but the thing is garan Masala is just one of a thousand combinations of Indian seasoning again Masala is just a word for spice blend and Indian food was about finding the right Blend or combination of spice spices meant to maximize the base ingredient of a specific dish not just pouring stuff into a pot and adding curry powder the first written record of curry powder comes of course in 1747 with the London publication of Hana glass's the art of cookery which if you watch this channel you're already familiar with as that was where we also find the first recipe for fried chicken now her initial recipe to show how little understanding there was of actual Indian cuisine lists only two ingredients in curry powder black pepper and coriander four years later a new addition would add Ginger and turmeric and eventually today's powder would take shape but here's the point curry powder would make it big it would become wildly popular in the UK and by the beginning of the 1800s eating the Indian way was fashionable anyone at a posh dinner party could show off their own Culture by cooking the exotic food of the s Savages across the ocean the subjects of the Glorious crown and as soon as it started to be mass-produced in England it was an affordable way to make food taste great just cook anything and add some curry powder in my opinion I think the issue is that curry powder is basically garam masala and what I mean by that is it's the stuff that people fought Wars over it is unequivocally delicious which means you take this thing curry powder you know all through history there have been I would say you know somebody lands on another person's land and gives a name to something and then over time either that name goes away or the the dish that they create that's supposed to be a representative of something goes away or you know there history is full of of U nonsense like calling a Cuisine Curry however in my opinion the problem is curry powder is amazing and so because of that it's spread everywhere it took off in a way that very few food in you know England at the time when curry powder was was introduced had something like 50 countries under the crown right at that time so it goes everywhere right everywhere you can get it all over the world and it's again it's the spices that people fought Wars over it's amazing and so you can't you know it was it was good as I you know that's my my issue is that curry powder became so definitive because it's delicious and I think that's part of the the problem am I am I crazy or or would you kind of go there with me yeah so you know a lot of history can be kind of summed up to what just made sense at the time and when the British kind of occupied India um for that long of a time you have Generations coming up being born there their families assimilated there and when they would go back to visit you know their families in England they would get to the point where they missed and craved the flavors that they grew up with and so they created something just called Curry powder and yes there's a lot of characteristics like gatam Masala um but one of the key characteristics in curry powder that makes it curry powder is an intense amount of um turmeric in it and turmeric you don't find in gam Masala gam Masala gam Masala literally translates to warming spices because you have a lot of really warming things that we in the west would see at the Christmas time era um and so when you look at curry powder I look at curry powder as you know people falling in love with a land that they occupied and then taking it back and there's a lot to unload there don't get me wrong but I think that ultimately you can really look at curry powder now and look at the depth of masalas there are thousands of masalas based off of a region and Village all across of all across India so to say everything is curry powder or curry curry powder was the predominant would really be doing a lot of the subcontinent a dis Justice curry powder would become a massive hit both within the British Empire and Beyond it would be the key ingredient in Curry Beef a Hong Kong chatan Ting staple you find it as the seasoning in Thailand's pineapple fried rice it would add flavor to Germany's iconic Curry worst show up in the fillings of a thousand kinds of foreign samosas and Curry Puffs make up the core of Korea's dock Bucky and when Queen Elizabeth took the crown in 1952 the dish meant to commemorate the occasion would be a sandwich of boiled chicken in mayonnaise and curry powder known forever as coronation chicken curry powder by the way would also be one of the imported ingredients to Japan during the time of the so-called Magi restoration when the country opened up to the world starting in the 1860s back then because curry powder was sold to the Japanese by the British it was considered yosaku or Western and it exploded in popularity especially as a dish made from curry powder stirred with flour and oil into a r and served as a gravy on top of meats or potatoes by the 1930s Japanese Curry was already one of the most popular dishes in the entire country today A worldwide phenomenon but that's not to say that every Curry dish that appears thousands of miles from India is based on the export of this powder now this is where the subject of Curry the idea of a name foisted onto a madeup category of food by the British in India become comes even more sensitive see the British were pretty brutal to their subjects in the subcontinent especially after 1833 when slavery was officially outlawed and all of a sudden an estimated 800,000 African laborers in English territories would have to be replaced so the British rounded up almost twice that number of Indians and sent them wherever was needed as indentured unpaid laborers for example in the Caribbean which is how Curry first came to be a part of the cuisine in places like Jamaica and Trinidad and in South Africa where a cast of Indian Traders known as Bas set up shops in Durban selling food to thousands of workers brought over to work on sugar can plantations Bach chow or bunny Chow is today one of the most iconic dishes in that country we started this video at a shopping mall in Bangkok looking at all the variations of curries that today make up the heart of Thai Cuisine and how those came to be and how they developed well every single one has its own story but at their root they all have some connection to the very first indis Valley stews to film this video we chose one of our favorite places and somewhere we film all the time on OTR our friend Kate's restaurant and this time we asked her to make us a few curries that would look good on camera she sent us four each one representative of a different part of Thailand a different culture or ethnic group but somewhere long ago one common ancestor there's panang curry which is actually from Thailand not Malaysia and takes its name from a chimar word that refers to a method of cooking chicken it starts of course with a spice blend combining ancient Indian aromatics with those local to Southeast Asia it's rich and peanutty and with a hint of fermented shrimp paste first added to curries in Myanmar and that brings us to gang hang Le one we already referenced earlier in a dish that came to Thailand by way of the north the Himalayan route by way of Bangladesh and Myanmar brought to Thailand by the M People there's G qua a southern Thai classic and basically what overseas we'd call a red curry here Kate made it for us with fish in a classic southern way and the recipe is similar to the base of a number of tha cures influenced by Indian immigrants to the Malay Peninsula and made in Thailand since at least the 18th century and of course the classic green curry a Bangkok staple and the newest dish on the table with roots dating back to approximately the 1920s this is a fully Thai invention the next generation of Curry if you will that was made not by Indians but by people from other cultures who simply follow the rules and techniques of that ancient practice one that with the creativity of modern chefs and the impact of foreign ingredients can elevate a dish to something that's truly special I think my thesis on this is that Curry does exist it does now right you know the way I use the word personally is to represent a stew that starts with the Masala right is the idea of taking and this can apply to to to a Tha Curry a Malaysian Curry a Jamaican curry you know South African uh uh bunny Chow you know when you take these spices and there are Telltale spices that started in North India right when you make that spice blend and you cook it into something where the spices are intended to make the protein taste as good as it can be to me I'm okay with calling that a curry just because I don't have another word there there's something that connects all this stuff you know it does come from one school of culinary thought and without another word to use I I'm okay personally using it but but I don't know tell me if I'm wrong that's just how how I view it as at least giving it some kind of meaning yeah words are a lot like food right there's an evolution to them as we continue to evolve and I and if you look back even thousands upon thousands of years ago we could say the first Curry existed in the indis valley 5,000 years ago where a lot of archaeologists were doing something called starch grain analysis and they would pick out little you know seeds and stuff from uh the teeth of decomposed bodies and they would be able to say oh well this was fennel this was Ginger this was garlic this is the first beginnings of Curry that's literally the entire purpose of this video by the way that's sort of what the video is that we're actually making is it's it's kind of tracking all of that maybe the biggest part of this story the thing that honestly is way more important than the name of the dish is the fact that the spices at its heart are now so affordable and so easy to find that cooks can find inspiration in creating recipes from the old School Punjabi stews to Iraqi tajri from Nepali jels to Ethiopian dorat from Tai Curry's to Malay curries Hong Kong curries Japanese curries Cambodian Kung and even South African bunny Chow don't forget these spices were the cause of wars and invasions the rise and fall of entire civilizations and the literal trigger for the Age of Exploration and now the idea that we can just walk down the street almost anywhere and grab a plate of something made with the most prized cultivars of the indis valley the Arabian Peninsula Ethiopia and Southeast Asia even if it's in the form of a mass-produced powder I mean that's just absolutely mindblowing so with all of that said for one last meal we might as well finish with something that might not look like the cuisine of the herens but still wouldn't exist without it a plate of Japanese Curry the most comforting of comfort foods and a perfect end to a very long day subscribe to the channel for more from OTR please consider supporting us on patreon it's how we keep this going and thank you so much to those who do check the links below for our social media and Instagram and we'll see you [Music] soon [Music]

Channel: OTR Food & History

Views: 555,532

Keywords: otr, OTR, curry, the history of food, food history, india, thai food, thailand, street food, iraqi curry, japanese curry, punjabi curry, keith sarasin, keith sarazen

Id: zt10iMRWg20

Length: 46min 2sec (2762 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 19 2023