Chapter 3 — The Spice Roads of Asia

"To me, the word 'curry' is as degrading to India's great cuisine as the term 'chop suey' was to China's." — Madhur Jaffrey, "Let the Truth Be Known: There Is No 'Curry' in India," Chicago Tribune, 1989

N o single word has done more damage to the reputation of Asian cooking, nor concealed more of its real architecture, than "curry." To the traveller who has only met it in a jar or a takeaway menu, curry names a genre — a brownish, spiced sauce, more or less interchangeable from one restaurant to the next. To the cook who actually made the dishes the word was coined to describe, no such genre exists at all. What English speakers lumped together under one borrowed word — probably from the Tamil kari, meaning sauce or relish, picked up by British and Portuguese traders on India's southern coast and then applied indiscriminately, by colonial habit, to virtually anything spiced and wet from Karachi to Jakarta — is in reality a family of entirely distinct culinary systems, each with its own logic of building flavour from raw spice, each proudly, specifically itself. This chapter follows that family from India east through Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia, not to catalogue a single spice road but to show four different grammars for the same raw material: dried seed, root and leaf, transformed by fire, water, or a stone mortar into the base of an entire cuisine.

The word's British colonial career is itself worth a moment's honest scrutiny, since it says more about the observer than the observed. English clerks and officers of the East India Company, encountering a bewildering variety of spiced dishes across a subcontinent whose languages they mostly did not speak, reached for the nearest convenient label and stopped looking closely; three centuries of empire then exported that same flattening habit onward to Southeast Asia, so that a British colonial officer in Malaya or a Dutch planter in Java might just as readily call a Malay gulai or a Javanese gudeg "curry" as an actual Tamil kari, regardless of how little the dishes had in common beyond being spiced and served with rice. The word survives today less as a description of any particular cooking than as a record of how incuriously the colonising eye once looked at the colonised kitchen — which is exactly the habit this chapter, and this volume's authenticity mandate more broadly, sets out to correct.

The guide for the Indian half of this journey is Madhur Jaffrey, actress turned cookery writer, whose An Invitation to Indian Cooking (1973) and BBC television series a decade later did more than any other single body of work to persuade Western kitchens that Indian food was not one cuisine but dozens, and that the "curry powder" tin on the supermarket shelf represented no Indian kitchen that had ever actually existed. Her insistence — voiced most bluntly in a 1989 newspaper essay this chapter borrows for its epigraph — that no Indian home cook measures from a fixed jar of "curry powder," because every dish calls for its own freshly chosen and freshly ground combination of spices, is the argument this whole chapter exists to extend eastward: masala, kreuang kaeng, and sambal are not one another's synonyms, and none of them is "curry powder" by another name.

India: The Architecture of Masala

To understand Indian cooking's real logic, the naturalist must set aside the single word "curry" entirely and learn instead two working terms that actually govern the Indian kitchen: masala and tadka. A masala is not a fixed product but a method — a spice combination, whole or ground, wet or dry, assembled fresh for a particular dish rather than drawn from a universal blend. Garam masala, the "warming spice mix" most Western pantries do keep a jar of, is itself not one formula but hundreds: a Punjabi household's garam masala, heavy with cinnamon, cardamom and clove, tastes nothing like a Tamil kitchen's version built around black pepper and dried red chilli, and the two are not variations on a theme so much as separate regional inventions that happen to share an English translation.

The second term, tadka — called chaunk in the north, baghaar in parts of the Deccan, phoron in Bengal — names the technique rather than the mixture: whole spices, most often mustard seed, cumin seed, dried red chilli, curry leaf and asafoetida, dropped into oil or ghee heated to somewhere around 180–200°C until they crackle, pop and release their fat-soluble aromatic oils in a matter of seconds, then poured, sizzling, over a finished dal or vegetable dish, or used at the very start of cooking to build a dish's base note. The chemistry is straightforward and the effect is not: many of the aromatic compounds locked inside a cumin or mustard seed are soluble in fat but barely soluble in water, so that a spice merely simmered in a watery sauce releases only a fraction of what the same spice, briefly fried, gives up almost at once. A bowl of plain yellow dal, tasted before and after a hot tadka of cumin, mustard seed and curry leaf is poured over it, can seem to belong to two different meals — the clearest possible demonstration, in a single spoon, of why Indian cooks reach for hot fat before they reach for more salt.

Regional diversity in India runs so deep that generalising about "Indian food" is arguably a greater sin than generalising about "European food," given the subcontinent's population, climate range and history. The wheat-growing north favours bread — roti, naan, paratha — meat cooked in the Mughal-influenced, dairy-rich style of Punjab and the old Mughal courts (a rich korma or a slow-braised nihari owing real debt to Persian and Central Asian technique carried in by Mughal rule from the sixteenth century onward); the rice-growing south builds its meals instead around rice, coconut, curry leaf, tamarind and a far more assertive use of dried red chilli, with Tamil Nadu's fermented-rice-and-lentil-batter idli and dosa, and Kerala's coconut-milk-based fish curries, representing an entirely separate culinary universe from anything cooked in Punjab. Bengal, in the east, builds its cooking around mustard oil and the fivefold spice blend panch phoron, and around freshwater fish rather than the meat of the north or the coconut of the south. Gujarat, largely vegetarian by both religious custom and long agricultural tradition, is famous for a deliberate, carefully calibrated balance of sweet, sour and spicy within a single dish — jaggery and tamarind worked together against chilli heat in a way that would strike a Punjabi or Tamil cook as a distinctly Gujarati signature. None of these traditions is more authentically "Indian" than the others; each is simply itself, and the flattening word "curry" was never capable of holding all four at once.

The everyday unit that carries all this regional variety to the ordinary table is the thali — literally a metal plate, and by extension the whole balanced meal served upon it: a mound of rice or a stack of bread, a dal, one or two vegetable dishes, a pickle, a yoghurt, arranged in small separate bowls or katoris around the plate's edge so that no single flavour dominates and the diner mixes and balances each bite by hand rather than eating each element in sequence. A Gujarati thali and a Tamil sappadu share this same organising idea — variety, balance, small quantities of many things rather than a large quantity of one — while differing entirely in their specific contents, and it is this everyday plate, far more than any restaurant's tandoori platter, that actually represents how most Indians eat most days. Dal itself deserves a word of its own: the word covers dozens of distinct pulses — split red lentils (masoor), split pigeon peas (toor), split black gram (urad), whole green gram (moong) among them — each cooked to a different texture and finished with its own regional tadka, so that "dal" is no more a single dish than "cheese" is in a French kitchen, and a good dal, contrary to its humble reputation abroad, is often the dish by which an Indian cook's real skill is judged.

It is worth adding, in the honest spirit this volume has set for itself, that the modern British "curry house" — descended from the officers' clubs and boarding houses that catered to nineteenth-century colonial administrators returning from India, and later built into a mass restaurant trade chiefly by Bangladeshi, particularly Sylheti, migrants from the 1950s onward — is a real and significant culinary tradition in its own right, but a British one, invented largely in Britain to British taste, rather than a transplanted slice of any Indian region's actual home cooking. Dishes such as chicken tikka masala, whose invention is popularly (if not entirely conclusively) credited to Bangladeshi-British restaurant kitchens of Glasgow or Birmingham in the 1960s and 1970s, are not failed or corrupted versions of an Indian original; they are a genuine new cuisine, born of migration and a British palate, and honestly presented as such rather than mistaken for the Punjabi or Bengali table it partly descends from.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 460 640" role="img"><title>The Layering of a Masala — tadka, aromatics, ground spice, simmer</title> <defs> <path id="fl" d="M0,0 C7,-5 15,-5 20,1 C15,4 9,7 5,12 C2,7 0,3 0,0 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.7"/> <g id="pan" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1" fill="none"> <ellipse cx="0" cy="0" rx="52" ry="8"/> <path d="M-52,0 Q-44,32 0,32 Q44,32 52,0"/> <path d="M-52,-1 L-64,-6 M52,-1 L64,-6" stroke-width="1.1"/> </g> <path id="arrow" d="M0,0 L0,44 M-5,37 L0,44 L5,37" fill="none" stroke="#9c5a2c" stroke-width="1"/> </defs> <rect x="14" y="14" width="432" height="612" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.2"/> <rect x="21" y="21" width="418" height="598" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(30,32)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(430,32) scale(-1,1)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(30,602) scale(1,-1)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(430,602) scale(-1,-1)"/>

<text x="230" y="52" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="17" letter-spacing="2" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">The Layering of a Masala</text> <line x1="140" y1="62" x2="320" y2="62" stroke="#9c5a2c" stroke-width="0.8"/> <text x="230" y="78" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="10" fill="#6f5a40">the order of the tadka, in four movements</text>

<g transform="translate(230,140)"> <text y="-38" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">I. Whole Spices</text> <path d="M-30,-30 Q-20,-42 -10,-30 M0,-32 Q10,-46 20,-32" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.6" fill="none"/> <use href="#pan"/> <g fill="#43331f"><circle cx="-20" cy="6" r="1"/><circle cx="-10" cy="10" r="1"/><circle cx="0" cy="4" r="1"/><circle cx="12" cy="10" r="1"/><circle cx="22" cy="6" r="1"/></g> <path d="M-6,-2 Q0,-10 8,-2" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.8" fill="none"/> <text y="58" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8.5" fill="#6f5a40">cumin · mustard seed · cinnamon · cardamom · bay leaf</text> </g> <use href="#arrow" transform="translate(230,205)"/> <text x="245" y="230" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8" fill="#9c5a2c">until they crackle</text>

<g transform="translate(230,290)"> <text y="-38" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">II. Aromatics</text> <use href="#pan"/> <path d="M-18,4 C-14,-4 -6,-4 -2,4 C-6,10 -14,10 -18,4 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.8"/> <path d="M6,0 Q10,-8 16,-4 Q20,0 16,6 Q10,10 6,4 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.7"/> <path d="M22,-2 Q30,2 34,10" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.7"/> <text y="58" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8.5" fill="#6f5a40">onion · ginger · garlic · green chilli</text> </g> <use href="#arrow" transform="translate(230,355)"/> <text x="245" y="380" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8" fill="#9c5a2c">until golden</text>

<g transform="translate(230,440)"> <text y="-38" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">III. Ground Spices</text> <use href="#pan"/> <g fill="#6f5a40"> <circle cx="-22" cy="6" r="0.7"/><circle cx="-16" cy="10" r="0.7"/><circle cx="-10" cy="4" r="0.7"/><circle cx="-2" cy="8" r="0.7"/> <circle cx="6" cy="4" r="0.7"/><circle cx="14" cy="9" r="0.7"/><circle cx="20" cy="5" r="0.7"/><circle cx="0" cy="14" r="0.7"/><circle cx="-8" cy="16" r="0.7"/><circle cx="10" cy="16" r="0.7"/> </g> <path d="M-30,0 Q0,-6 30,0" fill="none" stroke="#9c5a2c" stroke-width="0.5" stroke-dasharray="1,2"/> <text y="58" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8.5" fill="#6f5a40">turmeric · chilli · coriander · garam masala</text> </g> <use href="#arrow" transform="translate(230,505)"/> <text x="245" y="530" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8" fill="#9c5a2c">loosen with a little water</text>

<g transform="translate(230,590)"> <text y="-38" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="12" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">IV. The Simmer</text> <use href="#pan"/> <path d="M-40,-4 Q-30,-14 -20,-4 M-10,-6 Q0,-16 10,-6 M20,-4 Q30,-14 40,-4" fill="none" stroke="#a9906c" stroke-width="0.5"/> <path d="M-30,8 Q-20,4 -10,8 T10,8 T30,8" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <circle cx="-8" cy="14" r="4" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <circle cx="10" cy="18" r="3" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <text y="58" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="8.5" fill="#6f5a40">tomato · stock · simmered until the oil separates</text> </g>

<text x="230" y="618" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1" fill="#6f5a40">PLATE V — VOL. IV</text> </svg> <figcaption><em>Plate 5. The architecture of an Indian masala: whole spices bloomed in hot fat (the tadka), ground aromatics built in layers, and the regional variations — Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Gujarati — that make 'curry powder' a fiction no Indian kitchen recognises.</em></figcaption> </figure>

Thailand: The Pounded Paste and the Balance of Four

Cross the Bay of Bengal and the spice grammar changes almost entirely. Where Indian cooking builds flavour chiefly through spices bloomed in hot fat, Thai cooking builds it through the pounded paste — kreuang kaeng — a wet, aromatic base worked by hand with a heavy stone mortar and pestle, the khrok, until fibrous stalks of lemongrass, knobs of galangal, garlic, shallot and fresh or dried chilli are reduced to a single cohesive mass, releasing oils and juices no blade alone extracts as thoroughly as the crushing, grinding action of stone against stone. A red curry paste and a green curry paste share nearly the same list of aromatics — lemongrass, galangal, garlic, shallot, coriander root, kaffir lime zest (now more often called, and this chapter follows the shift, by its Thai name of makrut lime, since "kaffir" carries a long history as a racial slur in southern Africa that food writers and retailers have been actively retiring since the 2010s) — differing chiefly in which chilli goes in: dried red chillies pounded for kaeng phet, fresh green chillies for kaeng khiao wan. The technique, not the ingredient list, is the paste's real signature, and a Thai cook tasting a food processor's version of the same nominal ingredients will usually notice at once that something has gone missing — a rougher, more fragrant, less homogenised result that the machine's spinning blade, which shears rather than crushes, simply cannot reproduce.

This volume's first chapters, in an earlier book of this series, set out the naturalist's account of taste itself — sweet, sour, salty, bitter, umami, and the fifth-taste discoveries of the twentieth century — and Thai cooking offers perhaps the clearest possible field demonstration of that whole apparatus in daily use. Where a French or Italian dish typically foregrounds one or two flavour axes at a time, a well-made Thai dish is built, almost as a point of professional pride, to hold sweet, sour, salty and hot in active tension within a single mouthful — palm sugar against lime juice against fish sauce against fresh or dried chilli, adjusted at the table by the diner as much as by the cook, since a bottle of fish sauce, a small dish of dried chilli flakes, a wedge of lime and a spoon of sugar sit on most Thai tables precisely so each eater can retune the balance to their own taste. Thailand's own regional variety complicates any single national picture almost as thoroughly as India's does. The country's north-east, Isaan, culturally and linguistically close to neighbouring Laos, favours sticky rice eaten by hand rather than jasmine rice by spoon and fork, alongside fiercely sour-hot dishes such as som tam, green papaya pounded in a mortar with lime, fish sauce, palm sugar, dried shrimp and chilli until it weeps its own dressing, and larb, minced meat tossed with toasted rice powder, lime and fresh herbs — a cuisine built more on raw pounding and fermented fish sauce than on the coconut-rich curry pastes more associated with central Thailand. The Muslim-majority far south, bordering Malaysia, cooks with a heavier hand of turmeric and dried spice, closer in places to a Malay kitchen than to Bangkok's, a reminder that Thailand's own borders contain real internal diversity that a single national cookbook chapter chronically underserves. Massaman curry, the mild, deeply spiced curry built with cinnamon, cardamom, cloves and roasted peanuts rather than the fresh-herb brightness of a green or red curry, tells this balancing act's own migration story in its name alone: "massaman" derives from the Persian word for Muslim, and food historians trace the dish's origin to the seventeenth-century Ayutthaya kingdom, where Persian and Indian Muslim traders and diplomats — among them, by tradition, an envoy named Sheik Ahmed, who arrived at the Siamese court in the early 1600s[^1] — introduced warming, dried whole spices that Thai cooks then worked into their own existing grammar of paste, coconut milk and the four-way balance, producing a curry that is, in effect, a three-way conversation between Persia, the Indian Ocean spice trade and the Thai kitchen, still eaten daily and still called, honestly, by a name that remembers exactly where it came from.

Vietnam: Balance Through Freshness, and a French Loaf Made Vietnamese

Vietnamese cooking shares the Southeast Asian region's commitment to balance but pursues it by an almost opposite route from Thailand's pounded paste: where Thai cooking concentrates flavour into a dense cooked base, Vietnamese cooking scatters it, fresh and largely uncooked, across the top of a finished dish. Nuoc cham, the table sauce of fish sauce, lime juice, sugar, garlic and fresh chilli that appears alongside nearly every Vietnamese meal, performs in miniature the same four-way balancing act Thai cooking builds into its pastes, but it is added at the very end, by the diner, rather than cooked in from the start — and a meal typically arrives with an entire side plate of raw herbs (mint, Thai basil, perilla, saw-tooth coriander, bean sprouts) meant to be torn and folded in at will, so that no two bowls of the same soup, eaten at the same table, need taste quite identical.

Pho, the beef-and-rice-noodle soup now Vietnam's best-known dish abroad, is in fact a comparatively recent invention by the standards of this chapter's other cuisines: food historians place its emergence in the early twentieth century in Nam Định province, south-east of Hanoi, from a confluence of French colonial demand for beef (a meat far less central to earlier Vietnamese cooking, which leaned more heavily on pork, poultry and fish) and Chinese noodle-soup traditions brought by migrant labourers from Yunnan and Guangdong; the long-simmered beef-bone broth, fragrant with charred ginger, onion and whole star anise and cinnamon, likely descends from an older, humbler water-buffalo noodle soup called xáo trâu, refined and reinvented at the specific historical hinge where French colonial beef consumption met Chinese noodle technique on Vietnamese soil. As with Thailand and India, Vietnam's regional range beneath its best-known exports is considerable. The north, cooler and historically closer to Chinese culinary influence, favours subtler, less sweet, more black-pepper-forward seasoning, exemplified by Hanoi's own austere version of pho; the centre, around the old imperial capital of Huế, cooks in a noticeably spicier, more elaborately presented register that food writers trace to the exacting standards of the nineteenth-century Nguyễn dynasty's royal kitchens, producing refined small dishes such as bánh khoái and a fiery beef-and-lemongrass noodle soup, bún bò Huế, that shares almost nothing with Hanoi's gentler pho beyond the noodle itself; the south, warmer and more agriculturally abundant, cooks sweeter, with a freer hand with sugar, coconut milk and fresh herbs, and gave rise to bún chả, grilled pork over cold rice noodles that in Hanoi is a lunch speciality with its own more austere regional accent. Bánh mì tells an even more explicit colonial story: the French brought the baguette to Cochinchina, southern Vietnam, in the 1860s at the start of their colonial rule, and for decades it remained an expensive, faintly foreign luxury made from costly imported wheat; only when Vietnamese bakers began cutting the dough with rice flour, both to stretch scarce wheat and, as it happened, to produce a lighter, more delicately crackling crust better suited to the humid climate, did the loaf become genuinely affordable and genuinely Vietnamese — at which point Vietnamese street vendors filled it with pork pâté, pickled carrot and daikon, coriander, chilli and Maggi seasoning, and by the mid-twentieth century had turned a colonial import into one of the country's own defining street foods, sold today from Hanoi to the diaspora kitchens of Paris, Melbourne and California with barely a nod to its French origins left visible.

Indonesia: The Archipelago's Own Grammar, and the Rijsttafel's Uncomfortable Inheritance

Indonesia, an archipelago of more than seventeen thousand islands, resists any single culinary description more thoroughly than even India does, but two elements recur widely enough to serve this chapter's purpose: sambal, and the deep, patient art of a long-cooked spice paste best represented by rendang. Sambal is, at its simplest, a chilli condiment — but that simplicity conceals enormous range, with food writers reckoning the country's regional sambal traditions in the hundreds, from the raw, bright sambal matah of Bali, built from finely sliced shallot, lemongrass and chilli barely touched by heat, to the deep-fried, shrimp-paste-laden sambal terasi of Java, each version calibrated to its own island's produce and palate, and each Indonesian household, much like a Moroccan spice merchant's ras el hanout, holding its own particular formula as a point of quiet pride.

Rendang, the dry, intensely spiced beef dish of the Minangkabau people of West Sumatra, represents the opposite end of Indonesian cooking's range from a quick raw sambal: beef simmered for hours, sometimes most of a day, in coconut milk and a thick paste of chilli, galangal, turmeric, ginger, garlic and lemongrass until the liquid reduces entirely away and the meat is left coated in a near-caramelised, deeply spiced crust rather than sitting in any sauce at all — a method traditionally suited to preserving meat without refrigeration on long journeys, since the Minangkabau people have historically been notable travelling traders. Rendang's international reputation was cemented in 2011 and again in a 2017 reader poll when CNN's "World's 50 Best Foods" ranked it first, a recognition Indonesia has since folded into national pride, officially naming rendang one of the country's five national dishes in 2018 alongside soto, nasi goreng, sate and gado-gado.

Rendang travels, in practice, chiefly through the Padang restaurant, the Minangkabau institution — found not only across Sumatra but in nearly every Indonesian city and, increasingly, abroad — in which a startling array of small dishes, rendang among them, is set out on the table all at once in stacked bowls, the diner charged only for what is actually eaten. It is a serving style Indonesians themselves point out, not without some irony, bears a family resemblance to the rijsttafel discussed below: abundance displayed rather than portioned, though here on the diner's own terms rather than a colonial host's. Java, the archipelago's most populous island, contributes its own distinct sweetness to the wider Indonesian table — a fondness for palm sugar (gula jawa) worked even into savoury dishes, evident in the sweet soy-glazed fried chicken ayam goreng and the sweet-savoury noodle dish mi goreng — while Bali's cuisine, shaped by its distinct Hindu rather than Muslim-majority culture, allows pork a central place denied it in most of the rest of the archipelago, most famously in babi guling, whole spit-roasted suckling pig stuffed with the island's own base spice paste, basa gede.

None of this range, however, can be honestly presented without its most uncomfortable chapter: the rijsttafel, or "rice table," the lavish spread of dozens of small Indonesian dishes served together with rice that Dutch colonial households popularised across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Dutch East Indies. Its precise origin is debated — one persistent account holds that Indonesian domestic servants, cooking the varied dishes they already knew for Dutch employers, simply produced a wide spread by habit, and that it was the colonists themselves who decided to serve everything simultaneously as a single lavish sitting — but its social function under colonial rule is not seriously disputed: rijsttafel was consciously staged as a display of wealth and imperial abundance, a table designed to impress European guests with the scale of a colonised archipelago's bounty, prepared and served by Indonesian and Indo-European labour that received little of the credit and less of the reward. The dish survives today chiefly in the Netherlands, where Indonesian restaurants — largely established by Indo-European and Moluccan communities who emigrated after Indonesian independence in 1945 and the loss of Dutch colonial rule that followed — still serve rijsttafel to Dutch diners, a genuinely strange culinary afterlife in which a colonial-era performance of abundance has become, for an entire subsequent generation, an ordinary Friday-night dinner out, largely disconnected in the popular Dutch imagination from the power structure that invented it. To eat a rijsttafel today without that history is to eat only half the dish.

<figure> <svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="100%" viewBox="0 0 640 640" role="img"><title>The Mortar and the Paste — building a Thai curry paste, step by step</title> <defs> <path id="fl" d="M0,0 C7,-5 15,-5 20,1 C15,4 9,7 5,12 C2,7 0,3 0,0 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.7"/> <circle id="rd" r="40" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"/> </defs> <rect x="14" y="14" width="612" height="612" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1.2"/> <rect x="21" y="21" width="598" height="598" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="0.6"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(30,32)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(610,32) scale(-1,1)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(30,602) scale(1,-1)"/> <use href="#fl" transform="translate(610,602) scale(-1,-1)"/>

<text x="320" y="58" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="21" letter-spacing="3" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">The Mortar & the Paste</text> <line x1="230" y1="70" x2="410" y2="70" stroke="#9c5a2c" stroke-width="0.8"/> <text x="320" y="88" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-style="italic" font-size="11" fill="#6f5a40">khrok hin — the granite mortar, in six movements</text>

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<g transform="translate(415,505)"> <use href="#rd"/> <circle cx="-24" cy="-24" r="9" fill="#43331f"/><text x="-24" y="-20" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#a9906c">1</text> <path d="M-14,-4 Q-6,-16 4,-8 M-4,6 Q6,-6 16,2 M4,14 Q14,2 22,10" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"/> <text y="55" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10.5" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">Dried Chillies</text> </g>

<g transform="translate(225,505)"> <use href="#rd"/> <circle cx="-24" cy="-24" r="9" fill="#43331f"/><text x="-24" y="-20" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#a9906c">2</text> <path d="M-16,4 Q-10,-10 2,-8 Q14,-6 16,6 Q10,14 -4,12 Q-14,10 -16,4 Z" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"/> <line x1="-8" y1="0" x2="-4" y2="6" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.5"/><line x1="4" y1="-2" x2="8" y2="4" stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.5"/> <text y="55" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10.5" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">Galangal</text> </g>

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<g transform="translate(510,350)"> <use href="#rd"/> <circle cx="-24" cy="-24" r="9" fill="#43331f"/><text x="-24" y="-20" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" fill="#a9906c">6</text> <rect x="-14" y="-8" width="28" height="16" fill="none" stroke="#43331f" stroke-width="1"/> <g stroke="#6f5a40" stroke-width="0.4"><line x1="-14" y1="-3" x2="14" y2="-3"/><line x1="-14" y1="3" x2="14" y2="3"/></g> <text y="55" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="10.5" style="font-variant:small-caps" fill="#43331f">Shrimp Paste</text> </g>

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<text x="320" y="616" text-anchor="middle" font-family="Georgia, serif" font-size="9" letter-spacing="1" fill="#6f5a40">PLATE VI — VOL. IV</text> </svg> <figcaption><em>Plate 6. The mortar and the paste: lemongrass, galangal, garlic, chilli and shallot pounded by hand into a Thai kreuang kaeng or an Indonesian sambal base — the region's own answer to the tadka and the masala.</em></figcaption> </figure>

The Real Spice Road

It is worth pausing, before this chapter's field note and recipe, to notice what actually moved along the historical routes conventionally called the Spice Road — not curry, which never existed as a single thing to move, but specific commodities: black pepper and cardamom out of the Malabar coast of southern India; cloves and nutmeg, for centuries grown nowhere else on earth, out of the small Indonesian Banda Islands and the wider Moluccas, a monopoly so lucrative that Dutch and Portuguese and English trading companies fought outright wars over a handful of islands scarcely visible on a world map; cinnamon out of Sri Lanka; galangal and star anise moving in the other direction, from China and mainland Southeast Asia westward. Each cuisine in this chapter received a different subset of that traffic and worked it into a pre-existing local grammar rather than adopting any of it wholesale — which is precisely why an Indian tadka, a Thai kreuang kaeng, a Vietnamese table of raw herbs and an Indonesian sambal, built in places not enormously distant from one another and sharing more than one imported spice in common, nonetheless remain four entirely distinct ways of cooking, not four dialects of one imaginary "curry."

The trade itself long predates the European ships that eventually came to dominate its telling. Arab, Indian and Chinese merchants had carried pepper, cloves and cinnamon along monsoon-driven sea lanes between the Malabar coast, the Indonesian archipelago and the Middle East for well over a thousand years before the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama reached Calicut by sea in 1498 seeking, in his own expedition's later, much-quoted phrase, "Christians and spices" — a voyage that mattered not because it discovered the spice trade, which was already ancient and already vast, but because it opened a direct European sea route around Africa that cut out the Arab and Venetian middlemen who had until then controlled Europe's own access to the same goods. What followed — Portuguese, then Dutch, then British commercial and military competition for control of the Malabar coast and the Moluccas — reshaped the political map of maritime Asia for the next four centuries, and the cuisines this chapter has traced were cooked, changed and occasionally weaponised as leverage throughout that whole long contest, never merely a passive backdrop to it. It is a history this chapter's honesty obliges it to note plainly: the very spices that give India, Thailand, Vietnam and Indonesia their most celebrated flavours were also, for centuries, the specific commercial prize over which European empires fought and colonised, a fact any account of "the spice road" romantic enough to omit has not told the whole story.

Field Note — Garam Masala, or How a Blend Is Never Finished

Ask ten Indian home cooks for their garam masala and expect, honestly, ten different small jars, because the phrase itself means only "warming spice mixture," a category rather than a formula, and the specific contents are a matter of region, family and season rather than any fixed national recipe. A Punjabi version commonly leans on cinnamon, black and green cardamom, clove, black peppercorn and bay leaf, dry-roasted whole in a hot pan until the kitchen fills with their released oils and then ground fine, typically added toward the end of cooking so its more delicate, warming aromatics survive rather than cook away. A South Indian version is likely to lean harder on black pepper, dried red chilli and coriander seed, cooked in earlier and in greater quantity, reflecting a generally more assertive, heat-forward regional palate. Bengali cooks may reach instead for their own five-spice blend, panch phoron — fenugreek, nigella, cumin, black mustard and fennel seed left whole rather than ground, and bloomed directly in hot mustard oil rather than incorporated as a fine powder at all. What unites all of these into a single idea called "garam masala" is not a shared ingredient list — several versions share barely half their spices with one another — but a shared logic: whole spices, freshly roasted to wake their essential oils, combined in a proportion the cook has tuned, over years, entirely by nose and memory rather than by any written formula, then ground only in the quantity needed for the week ahead, since a masala's aromatic oils begin fading from the moment the grinding stone or blade first breaks the seed open. A tin of pre-mixed "garam masala powder," bought months earlier and left in a cupboard, is to this living, regionally specific practice roughly what a bottled salad dressing is to a vinaigrette whisked fresh at the table — a serviceable shortcut, but not, in any honest sense, the same dish Madhur Jaffrey's grandmother would have recognised.

Nam Prik Kaeng Phet — Thai Red Curry Paste

The base of Thailand's best-known family of curries, made properly by hand with a stone mortar and pestle rather than a food processor, whose spinning blade shears the aromatics instead of crushing and bruising them — a difference a Thai cook can taste in the finished dish. This paste keeps well and freezes for months, and forms the working base for a red curry (kaeng phet) with meat, fish or vegetables simmered afterward in coconut milk.

Makes about 200g (enough for one curry serving 4) · Time 30–40 minutes

Ingredients

8–10 dried long red chillies, stems removed, seeds shaken out for a milder paste, soaked in warm water for 15 minutes until soft, then drained
1 tsp coriander seeds
½ tsp cumin seeds
½ tsp white peppercorns
1 tbsp finely chopped lemongrass (tender inner stalk only)
1 tsp finely chopped galangal
1 tsp finely grated makrut (kaffir) lime zest
1 tbsp chopped coriander root and stem (reserve the leaves for garnish elsewhere)
6 garlic cloves, peeled
4 shallots, peeled and roughly chopped
1 tsp shrimp paste (kapi), or omit for a vegetarian version
½ tsp salt

Method

Dry-roast the coriander seeds, cumin seeds and white peppercorns in a small pan over medium heat for a minute or two, shaking constantly, until fragrant — take care, as they scorch quickly. Grind to a fine powder in a spice grinder or mortar and set aside.
Drain the soaked chillies well and chop roughly. Place in the mortar with the salt, and begin pounding in a steady, rhythmic motion, working the chillies against the sides of the mortar rather than merely mashing downward, until they break down into a rough paste.
Add the lemongrass and galangal and continue pounding until fibrous, then add the makrut lime zest and coriander root, pounding until the whole mass is fairly smooth.
Add the garlic and pound until incorporated, then the shallots, a little at a time, continuing to pound and turn the mixture with a spoon between rounds so that everything at the bottom eventually meets the pestle.
Add the ground roasted spices and the shrimp paste, if using, and pound for a final few minutes until the whole mixture forms a cohesive, deep-red, fairly smooth paste with visible flecks of lemongrass fibre still present.
To use: fry two to three tablespoons of the paste in a little of the thick cream skimmed from the top of a tin of coconut milk, over medium heat, stirring constantly, until the oil separates and the paste turns fragrant and a shade darker — a step Thai cooks call "cracking" the coconut cream — before adding meat, thinned coconut milk, fish sauce and palm sugar to build a finished curry.

Cook's note: A food processor will produce a workable paste in far less time and is not a betrayal of the dish, but a mortar and pestle produces a rougher, more fragrant result precisely because crushing ruptures the aromatic oil cells more thoroughly than a blade's shearing action — the same principle, worked with a different tool, that makes an Indian tadka's briefly fried whole spices taste more alive than the same spices merely stirred into a simmering sauce.

Four different tools — the tempered oil, the pounded paste, the scattered fresh herb, the long-cooked sambal — for the same underlying question every cook on this spice road has asked for centuries: how to persuade a handful of dried seed and green stalk to give up the whole of its flavour. None of the answers is "curry," and all of them deserve to be called, and eaten, by their own true names. The next chapter follows the road further east again, into China, Japan and Korea, where fermentation rather than fresh spice becomes the organising principle of an entirely different family of tables.

[^1]: The story that Persian envoy Sheik Ahmed personally introduced the spices behind Massaman curry to the Ayutthaya court in the early seventeenth century is widely repeated in popular food writing but rests on thin primary documentation; what is well attested is that Persian Shiite Muslims lived and traded within Ayutthaya during this period, and that mid-nineteenth-century Thai writers already referred to the dish under names meaning, roughly, "Muslim curry" — evidence enough for the dish's Persian-Muslim trade connection, even where the specific Sheik Ahmed anecdote should be read as tradition rather than settled history.

บทถัดไป · 7 / 15Chapter 4 — The Far East