Curry: Where did it come from?

Spices found in a lamb vindaloo were also found in food remains dating back 4,000 years
Curry is such a British favourite, the UK celebrates National Curry Week, but how was the food invented?
The UK has adopted curry as a "national dish", with more than 9,000 Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi restaurants and the creation of British-Asian dishes such as chicken tikka masala and balti, says the National Curry Week website.
It says about 23 million people eat curry regularly.
Since its inception, the word curry has "changed its meaning and become universal as a menu word", says Alan Davidson, in the Oxford Companion to Food.
Once it just meant Indian food, but "it now denotes various kinds of dish in numerous different parts of the world, but all are savoury and all are spiced," it reads.
"Everywhere the cuisine is enjoyed has its own variations and peculiarities," says the National Curry Week spokesperson.
An English cookbook, The Forme of Cury, was published in the 1390s, and all hot food was called "cury" from the French word cuire, meaning to cook.
Alan Davidson writes however that curry comes from the Tamil word kari, or spiced sauce, which was originally a thin, soup-like, spiced dressing served in southern India, amongst many other stew-like dressings for meat and vegetables.

The most complex and sophisticated puree sauces are made in Asia and Mexico.
The sauce or "gravy" for many Indian and Thai dishes begins with finely ground plant tissues - onions, ginger, garlic in northern India, coconut in southern India, and in Thailand, a number of different spices and herbs.
These ingredients are then fried in hot oil until much of the moisture has boiled off, and the plant solids are sufficiently concentrated that the sauce clings to itself and the oil separates.
The first curry recipe in English was published by Hannah Glasse in 1747.
Meanwhile, back in India, the original kari itself had changed, as chillies originally found in Mexico and South America, were introduced to Asia.
From that time on kari included chillies, and became a worldwide phenomenon.
"The British took spices all across the world and started growing them in different countries," says Cyrus Todiwala. "And now we are a nation with so much spice that actually when Indians go back to India for holidays, we take spices back with us."
But curry's origins may go even further back.
Scientists believe they may have found evidence of a 4,000-year-old "proto-curry" in India's ancient Indus Valley civilisation.
Traces of cooked ginger and turmeric (which remain in use in curries such as lamb vindaloo today) were found in starch grains in human teeth and a cooking pot found in the ancient town of Farmana, west of Delhi by anthropologists.