It’s a spicy gift, whatever you call it

Karoostew

CURRY. One little word, one big fat cuisine. The word doesn’t even mean what it seems to mean. Curry. Kari.

There’s a thing named a curry leaf, but that’s not it. Should it rather have been called masala? A mix of spices which, combined, produces a certain flavour.

Yet there are even more masalas than there are spices, because if you use just a little more of this, or a little less of that, or leave that one out, or those two, or add some of that or some of this, your masala is another kind of masala.

Aunty Anushia’s masala is not quite the same as Granny Devi’s masala. And don’t you dare tell Devi hers is not better than Nush’s. You will get The Look. You know The Look.

A kari leaf is indeed one used in Indian cuisine. It has a powerful flavour, an unmistakable punch of something a bit bark-like, a little bitter, a certain sweetness.

Brits, who don’t always get things right when it comes to things from “over there” – they mean pretty much anything beyond the Thames Barrier – thought they’d just call it curry ( because it sounds like kari, at least when spoken with one of the scores of English accents in the UK), and that’s that. So now were all lumped with it.

That’s what it’s like to be English ( I’m half- Brit, so I should know.) It’s like a Jewish person can tell a Jewish joke, but anyone else daring to do so is anti- semitic. Which is a pity, because Jewish jokes are the best, as anyone who has heard Allan Sherman’s Jewish jokes and hilarious song parodies would tell you. (Check out www.jewishhumorcentral.com)

If you’re a Brit, you just decide how things will be and everybody else must follow suit. Usually, they do. They didn’t rule much of the 19th-century known world because they liked all those people over there.

They wanted to dominate them. And change the names of their cuisines’ finest dishes. Rhodes and his ilk have more to answer for than murder, rape and plunder in what became Zimbabwe.

So Indian people just gave up and started calling it curry themselves, thinking, “What do we know anyway?” When, in the 1700s and 1800s, the British colonial types in India wanted to take some “curry” home to show their relatives just how exotic there lives had been “over there”, savvy Indian merchants started mixing not-quite-sohot powders together to sell to them to take home.

Over time they became the unremarkable “curry powders” you buy in the shops today. Rather find a proper spice shop.

Still, words come to mean what the use of language decides they will mean.

So curry is what we think of it as. And that’s that.

So, to use the broad term, the spicy marvel that is at once delicious and burny and fragrant and heady, curry is one of my favourite things and one of those I want to celebrate as we wind down to the last of these columns in a few weeks’ time.

I have my own way with curry, influenced largely by my imaginings of what a curry should taste like, but also by influences from my wife Diane and her late mother Joan to the late, great columnist Madeleine van Biljon ( who taught me a thing or two about cooking curry) and, not least, to Devi Moodliar and her daughter- in- law Anushia ( Nush) Moodliar in the good old Talk of the Town Cape Town Press Club days of the 1990s.

Nush’s husband Robin Moodliar liked to tell this joke (“I’m Indian, I can tell an Indian joke,” he liked to say with a broad grin):

What did the Indian ghost say? “Boo an’ all.”

From all of those sources came a distillation which, when blended with my own sense of taste and sheer wilfulness, comes down to the side panel on this page.

This isn’t a recipe, it’s a guide. For the rest, you’re on your own. Ciao an’ all.