What Makes a Curry, a Curry?

The history of kari, or curry, is genuinely complicated, and it shifts depending on which country, culture or even region you're talking about. Ask someone from the UK and curry means the local Indian takeaway, the curry house on the high street of every village. Here in Australia, our associations lean differently again, often shaped as much by Indonesian, Vietnamese and Thai curries as by Indian ones. And within every one of those traditions, there are passionate, ongoing debates about what counts as authentic. I don't pretend to have a ruling on any of it. I cook from other people's cookbooks and from family recipes passed down and adapted, and I trust those sources over any single definition.

What I won't cook, ever again, is the curry powder and sultana version that somehow became the Australian suburban standard through the 1980s. Genuinely dreadful, and worth leaving in the past.

Right now, in the middle of winter, a proper flavoursome, spiced, coconut-style curry feels like exactly the right thing. It warms you from the inside, it stretches easily to feed a crowd, and it's endlessly good with a crisp poppadum on top, paratha for dipping, and a bowl of fragrant white rice.

If you've got a view on curry leaves, or on what makes a curry a curry in your own kitchen, I'd love to hear it, and there'll be more of this conversation on Sonshine FM this Wednesday morning at 9.15am.

I was recently at a "curry in a hurry" party, the kind of get together where everyone turns up with a pot of something warm and spiced and the table ends up looking like a map of half the world. I brought a glorious, warming, spiced Burmese chicken coconut curry. Our host, who grew up in India, brought a chicken curry too, but his was distinctly Indian, shaped by the kitchen he loves to create in. Around them sat a duck curry, a beef rendang, an eggplant curry and a seafood curry amongst others. So many dishes all reflecting our different ideas of what a curry is.

A few days later I was telling my friend (and sharing some leftovers), who'd sadly missed the night, how good it all was. He stopped me: but how could your dish be a curry if it didn't use curry leaves?

It's a fair question, and one I hear often. But I don't think it holds up.

Curry leaves belong to a specific culinary tradition, prominent in South Indian and Sri Lankan cooking, and they're glorious when used well. But they were never universal, and the word "curry" itself isn't really theirs to own. Curry is, in large part, a colonial word. It was flattened by the British into a catch-all for the spiced, saucy dishes they encountered across South Asia, and it's since stretched to cover Thai curries, Japanese curry, Caribbean curry and everything in between. Today it mostly identifies a style: something spiced, something saucy, something that wants rice, naan or paratha alongside it. Not a fixed recipe, and not a fixed ingredient list.