How Curry Became a Japanese Naval Tradition | Hacker News Reader

How Curry Became a Japanese Naval Tradition

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115 pointsextraterra62 comments

> The word “curry” originated in India, although it did not have a long history there. Instead, it derived from a Portuguese mispronunciation of a term meaning “spices,” which British colonizers applied to a wide swath of Indian dishes.

Such misinformation that I can't even...

Kari is a Tamil word. I am Tamil. It has been in the vocabulary for thousands of years. Just made some elephant yam kari for lunch. It is always dry. Zero gravy. Something with gravy is kootu.

(Japanese kare is something completely different. It is by definition a thick gravy. It might trace its origins to india. But it is a separate dish now.)

Exactly! There is also a term "kaai-kari" meaning vegetable dry side dish for a main course. Kari as a term is as old as pepper. Any dish that had pepper used to be called as kari (see [1])

[1] https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/tamil-lex_query.p...

FWIW online etymologies seem to suggest this description isn't totally off, but I agree the bit about it not having a history is transparently wrong.

Etymonline[1]:

> kind of sauce or relish much used in Indian cookery, from the leaves of a southwest Asian plant related to the lemon, 1680s, from Tamil (Dravidian) kari "sauce, relish for rice," also "a bite, bit, morsel." As "meat or vegetable stew flavored with curry powder," 1747 in British English.

This one implies that கறி can refer to the spice in a dish as well as the dish as a whole--seems likely. That is, for instance, how "masala"[2] works in Hindi, which literally means 'spices' but can help form the name of an entire dish, as in "paneer masala".

Wiktionary[3]:

> 1747 (as currey, first published recipe for the dish in English[1][2]), from Tamil கறி (kaṟi), influenced by existing Middle English cury (“cooking”),[2] from French cuire (“to cook”) (from which also cuisine), from Vulgar Latin cocere, from Latin coquere, present active infinitive of coquō.

> Earlier cury found in 1390 cookbook Forme of Cury (Forms of Cooking) by court chefs of Richard II of England.

To be clear: what happened here is that English already had a word "curry" (this is the one we get in the expression "curry favor"), and it encountered and incorporated the Tamil word which coincidentally had an identical pronunciation and a very related meaning.

[1]: https://www.etymonline.com/word/curry#etymonline_v_491

[2]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%A4%AE%E0%A4%B8%E0%A4%BE%E...

[3]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/curry#Etymology_1

> To be clear: what happened here is that English already had a word "curry" (this is the one we get in the expression "curry favor"), and it encountered and incorporated the Tamil word which coincidentally had an identical pronunciation and a very related meaning.

It would be a good candidate to look into the origins of further, perhaps there is a proto-indio-european link and it's not a coincidence.

Tamil is dravidian, not indoeuropean.

Interesting that a synonym for கறி is தேய் which google-tamil translates as either curry or chafe the later meaning to warm by rubbing which then may be an attempt to curry favor with someone :)

If you curry a horse, you are (generally) not cooking it but brushing it with a curry comb (the chafe or rubbing meaning). This would be where 'currying favor' comes from, since horses tend to like being curried.

If Google Translate is machine learned for Tamil->English, I suspect it is just confused.

That was simply an amusing illustration of an English word which lacks a clean etymology or consistent usage

There is another etymology that 'Curry': Cury (from French cuire, meaning to cook) appeared in the 1390s in an English cookbook, 'The Forme of Cury'.(From Wikipedia).

May be from Malayalam rather than Tamil. In Malayalam, the dish with gravy is Curry, and dry dishes are never described as curry. Portuguese had at least initially more interaction with the west coast of the Indian peninsula, than the east coast, I suppose.

But even in Malayalam, curry/kari could also be used as an umbrella term for any accompaniments with rice, dry and wet. 'Chorum kariyum' - in this context curry is accepted as all the stuff that you eat with a regular rice meal (including the dry 'thoran'), atleast in where I'm from.

On a tangent - there are at least two other instances of "Kari" in Tamil (the words for Meat and Charcoal). The last two are distinct in their Tamil spellings, but it is impossible to render this distinction in Roman script :)

I can imagine that the culinary term is somehow derived from (or related to) the term for Charcoal, since the verb form implies blackening by fire.

Nice article. I remember first reading about kinyou curry in the manga series "Zipang" by Kaiji Kawaguchi, in which a modern Japanese Aegis destroyer gets time-warped back to WWII on the first day of the Battle of Midway.

Semi-related: We hear a lot about about Japanese curry when it comes to soupy things. But we never hear about Japanese stew (shichuu). Sometimes when I was getting sick of curry--hard to imagine now--a plate of rich creamy (white) beef stew with some rice in the middle of winter was just the thing. The roux blocks for stew were right next to the curry roux blocks in the store. It had a unique taste that I haven't experienced since moving back to the states. Example picture:

http://darjapan.blogspot.com/2012/10/hokkaido-cream-stew.htm...

Looks delicious

If you manage to find a Japanese grocer, it's a staple item. In a pinch, order through Amazon:

House Foods Cream Stew, 4.93 Ounce (Pack of 10) by House Foods Link: http://a.co/d/hXsgx21

Awesome, thank you!

There is a page on the Ministry of Defense website listing curry recipes for various ships/subs/etc. in the JMSDF.

http://www.mod.go.jp/msdf/formal/family/recipe/archive/curre...

I do wish they'd change the Japanese naval flag -- in much of East Asia the Rising Sun Flag is seen as a symbol of oppression and Japanese imperialism, almost as potent as a Nazi swastika. It doesn't do Japan any good to fly the old imperial flag from every Maritime Self Defense Force vessel, even if it was the naval flag since 1889 (by which time Japan already had imperial designs).

If the Japanese had to change their military symbols for that reason, every country in the world would. Even Germany still uses the iron cross as the symbol of their air force.

I don't see why every country would have to change their symbol. Yes, all countries have guilt in their pasts, as do all people, but Imperial Japan was a fascist regime that killed 50 million often with horrific brutality. And let's remember, it's just a war flag, you can change it with the stroke of a pen. The flag won't care. The Self Defense Forces won't start to suck, and the neighbors will have one less reason to think of Japan as an enemy, a real boost to national defense. You might not understand the depth of animus in the region against Japan -- schoolchildren are taught to despise it because of the fascist empire, and the Rising Sun Flag is shown as an analog to the Nazi swastika. Completely unlike Germans, Japanese are portrayed as at best ignorant of the dark side of their own nation's history, and flying a flag that on sight causes more than a billion people to swell with rage because they connect it to Japan's fascist past does nothing to dispel that notion. Fret not, the neighbors also choose to forget the dark sides of their pasts. Yet they must all live together, in an environment that feels like it mixes 21st century technology with late 19th century nationalism.

I love Japan. I've been visiting five or six times a year for quite a while. I flew in naval exercises alongside the Maritime Self Defense Forces. I enjoy Japanese curry. You should really try curry soup in Sapporo, it's fantastic. I could happily live in Japan for the rest of my days. I'd still be happy if they changed the damn counter-productive war flag.

Flags gain meaning over time. It does not care but people do.

I feel like the people who would be upset about the flag would also be the same people who wouldn’t be satisfied by merely a flag change. They’d say “so what if you just changed your flag? Now change the history curriculum in high school”. And they wouldn’t stop there either, they’d ask for further changes because it’s never enough. “ Why haven’t you demolished the Yasukuni shrine yet?”

I’m _not_ saying that a country that committed crimes in the past shouldn’t have to atone for that by making changes. Germany did this much better than Japan. All I’m saying is that there will be people in the country who will oppose kowtowing to requests like the one you’ve made because they think it’s impossible to satisfy people who make such requests.

> Even Germany still uses the iron cross

Yeah they're not using the swastika though are they?

Very different history on the swastika. The iron cross was used by Germany for 100 years before the Nazi party showed up. On the other hand, the swastika was imported by the Nazi’s and has non German roots.

Similarly, the Rising Sun Flag has deep Japanese roots and is thus less tainted by that time period.

> in much of East Asia the Rising Sun Flag is seen as a symbol of oppression and Japanese imperialism

The british flag, spanish flag, french flag, russian flag and even the american flag are greater symbols of oppression and imperialism in east asia. I don't think we are going to be changing flags anytime soon. The greatest and most oppressive imperialists in asia wasn't the japanese after all. It was mostly europeans with a dash of american imperialism thrown in the mix.

But that's besides the point. Also, how about letting the east asians decide amongst themselves what they find offensive. No sense in us being offended on their behalf.

> The british flag, spanish flag, french flag, russian flag and even the american flag are greater symbols of oppression and imperialism in east asia.

I'm sorry but this is simply incorrect, I mean it's not even close. For example you'll see people wearing all of those flags (except the Russian) on their clothing, and you might even see someone wear a Japanese flag (rarely) but never ever the Rising Sun Flag which, btw, isn't a national flag at all, but a military flag. It was, for example, banned at the Beijing Olympics. Please don't try this but if you went outside in many East Asian countries with a big Rising Sun Flag you might not even make it down the street.

Second, the Japanese Empire was not at all like the British, French or Spanish in East Asia. However we can say that European imperialism and European racism strongly pushed Meiji-era Japan to seek an empire. At times the Japanese Empire was more brutal than others, at times it did serious economic development, and during World War II it was horrific to say the least. The European Empires in East Asia were no saints. Look at China. European meddling is remembered as shameful. Japanese conquest and war is remembered as catastrophic and evil.

Please, ask a Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese what they think.

> I'm sorry but this is simply incorrect, I mean it's not even close.

It isn't incorrect. It's history. Europeans have been colonizing east asia for a long time. China and most of asia consider what the europeans did to them the "age of humiliation".

> It was, for example, banned at the Beijing Olympics. Please don't try this but if you went outside in many East Asian countries with a big Rising Sun Flag you might not even make it down the street.

I agree. But that's politics rather than history.

> Second, the Japanese Empire was not at all like the British, French or Spanish in East Asia.

You are right. Lots of nationalists in asia credit the japanese for ending european colonization in asia. So it is different.

> Japanese conquest and war is remembered as catastrophic and evil

For political reason, not historical reason.

> Please, ask a Chinese, Korean, Taiwanese, Vietnamese what they think.

What makes you think I haven't?

As I said, for political expediency, it is easier for asians to scapegoat the japanese, but many educated asians respect what the japanese did to rid asia of european colonization.

That doesn't mean they don't abhor what the japanese empire did to them. It just means they appreciate that the japanese helped end european/white domination of asia.

After all, the japanese were the first asian nation to defeat a european power. And it's why most of asia ( including china ) model themselves after japan to a degree.

You are mistaking optics political expediency for history and reality.

I eat pre-mixed Thai curry paste from this brand called "Mae Ploy" with coconut oil, powdered coconut milk, meat (either chicken or beef) and vegetables. There's about five different flavors and for $8 you get a 2 pound bucket of it I have never actually been able to finish one in less than a year.

Turns out I can eat an amazing very low carb meal for about $2 a day and 2-3 minutes of meal prep. It's currently my "meal for life".

If there is a Japanese pre-mixed curry for sale, let me know!

https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=カレー%20ルー

They should be available at any shop that sells Japanese or Asian food

S&B Golden Curry

That sounds delicious, I love how much flavour is packed in Thai curry paste. But how can you make a fully cooked curry in 2-3 minutes?

Thai curry is cooked quickly, usually in a wok. Japanese curry, in contrast, is usually simmered for a long time. The latter is to thicken and soften the meat and vegetables. Thai curry’s consistency is managed by using more or less coconut milk vs the actual paste. And the meat and vegetable pieces are cut much smaller so they cook almost instantly.

Depends on the recipe a traditional Rogan Josh should be marinated for 24-48 Hours.

I also tend to do tika in a wok if I am doing a curry then simmer the cocked chicken in the wok to finish it off.

We were discussing Thai curry. There are some dishes cooked in Thailand that are marinated or slow cooked, but curries aren’t. Southern curries are cooked a little longer. But it’s common to get e.g., massaman curry in Thailand with undercooked potatoes.

I am embarrassed to admit this but I use a microwave-safe ceramic dish with lid for steaming vegetables. I put two to four tablespoons of coconut oil and 4 tablespoons of curry paste. I heat it up for 30 seconds and mix it and add coconut milk powder. Then I fill it with frozen vegetables and nuke it for 10-15 minutes.

The frozen chicken breasts are cooked in toaster oven for 45-75 minutes at 400f in a cast iron flat plate skillet. I usually start the microwave when this is done, because again I am very lazy and need to run another 20 amp circuit to that spot of the kitchen.

I cut up the cooked chicken and put it in the bowl when it is finished. I have it timed so everything is perfectly cooked. Probably the most offensive and lazy way of cooking this dish, quick and about $2.25 total including frozen chicken, frozen vegetables, paste, coconut oil, and milk. You could add $.13 for about 1kw for electricity to be fair.

there are lots of premixed Japanese curry blends. Start off with Golden Curry roux blocks, and then you might want to branch out to other brands like Vermont Curry (tastes of apple and honey, its right there on the package!). Its actually even lazier dish than Mae Ploy because all you add it water. You dont even need to have coconut milk in the pantry.

Came here to shill roux blocks too. Learned about them just a month ago. Easy to prepare and great flavor!

Ah now I am dropped back 20 years in my past when I first had a curry udon, delicious and piping hot with gigantic pieces of melting tofu and soft boiled potato. I went back often to this cosy locale buried in the chinatown of a busy southern-hemisphere city. One day, it had disappeared and I still feel its loss. Though I try to reproduce this at home, and I try japanese curry whenever I come across one, I'll never again know those first flavours that brought me such happiness. It must have been a homemade curry because every store brand I've tried doesn't match my expectations. I'll keep trying..

The Royal Dutch Navy has a similar tradition: every Wednesday they serve 'blauwe hap' (blue bite, originating from the blue uniforms they used to wear): a dutch adaptation of the Indonesian dish nasi goreng.

I think curry is a adopted food in most cold countries and a native dish in hot, humid countries.

A thick stew with tons of spices and salt is basically a food preservation mechanism - especially for vegetables and meat which would spoil quickly.

Similarly, the origin of baked bread - cold countries had a stove for heating the home. someone figured out how to use it as an oven. Most hot countries use fried bread or roasted unleaved bread (roti). Because it is insane to stand over a stove for too long in such temperatures.

Preparing food in an oven or the very similar cooking pit has been popular in civilizations around the world. The difference to cold climates is that you keep the oven outside the building.

Just want to chime in to say Japanese curry is awesome! Nothing against Indian or Thai curry, I love those different varieties too.

But just that Japanese curry is its own thing, it is very different and you might like it even if you shy away from other kinds.

Anybody here a fan of Japanese curry?

Japanese curry is something different and special. There's something really savory and umami about it. CoCo Ichi is the jam, basically the Japanese waffle house.

I love CoCo Ichi, I visit there once a week, basically.

In case someone is wondering why this only discusses curry being a naval tradition, although both the Army and Navy had the same beriberi problem—the Army solved it the same way as the Navy. Curry is as much a staple meal in the Army as Navy, just not celebrated as a culture as much.

what i took from article for my next cooking: "powder, butter, meat (typically beef), root vegetables, and a sauce thickened with flour."

sounds simple enough to try

Super easy.

I would have said chicken rather than beef which is hugely popular in Brisbane at lunch time.

I've done this one a few times: double up on the sauce ingredients so you have plenty of gravy. Also simmer for as long as you can so the carrots and onion pretty well dissolve and you get a thicker sauce. You can also add Mirin and cut back on the honey.

http://allrecipes.co.uk/recipe/29578/chicken-katsu-curry.asp...

not just curry but soup is also indian! of course completely denied by the west so far

soup is from sanskrit supa attested in arthashastra of kautilya dated to 1st millennium BC by westerners and 2nd millennium BC by indians

see link for specific quote from the text: http://www.alexmthomas.com/2016/05/22/a-review-of-trautmanns...

not to mention rice is an indian word as well

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rice#Etymology

but last time i tried mentioning that someone accused me of hindu nationalism and the banhammer was gonna fall

Genetic evidence suggests that rice was cultivated in Southeast Asia (Yangtze River Valley). See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3101000/. So, its true linguistic origin may still be something upstream.

actually genetic evidence is for multiple centres of domestication with later mixing

providing a link for this is what got me accused last time so just search for how old is indian agriculture on your fave search engine

in any case the chinese word is mi and has no linguistic relation to the word rice

even the japanese call rice with a mix of the chinese and indian words

> in any case the chinese word is mi and has no linguistic relation to the word rice

I'm not suggesting a Chinese origin of the word. But I suspect this may not be the final answer. First, the Mandarin Chinese pronunciation of the character "mi" (rice) today may not be the same as what it was pronounced 10,000 years ago. Second, people who lived in the Yangtze River Valley back then might not be speaking a Sinitic language. They might be speaking a Kra-Tai language.

> just search for how old is indian agriculture on your fave search engine

Pretty sure there were multiple origins of agriculture (e.g., Mesopotamia and Levant among others). It is difficult to argue which place came up with agriculture first.

ok but postulating chinese called it rice first and then switched to mi but rest of world kept it as rice is a stretch

rice entered europe as oryza not all that long ago and the link to tamil arici is straightforward and heavy trade existed between rome and india such that we keep finding hoards of roman era coins in india

romans were even complaining of a trade deficit with indians and emptying of their treasury

Soup as a dish, or the etymology of the word "soup"? Because soup as a dish predates recorded history certainly[1] (evidence found for it as far back as 20,0000 BC) but possibly even the modern human species. And if the dish is that old and universal, every culture would have its own name for it. "supa" and "soup" sounding similar is probably just a coincidence.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soup

it is not just similar sounds

ctrl f supa in the link above i believe the dish described is basically the same

and the arthashastra in any case outclasses all other attestations even if you take western dating

the pushback on this etymology is seemingly more than even for the word cash which is also an indian word but the english would even prefer to credit the french for it than indians

french caisse is a tangential link at best while tamil cash is actually cash and got printed on coins as such and derives from sanskrit karsha a measure of weight also attested in arthashastra and so of similar age

> i believe the dish described is basically the same

"Basically the same" as what? "Soup" is a very broad term encompassing many, many dishes.

> and the arthashastra in any case outclasses all other attestations even if you take western dating

The Arthashastra is supposedly from the 2nd century BCE[1], but even if it's as old as Sanskrit itself[2], it still comes at least 15,000 years after the first evidence of soup. Soup is older than any language that's known today. Why would other cultures suddenly start using a Sanskrit word for a food that they've known and enjoyed for thousands of years?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sanskrit

> Internet and satellite communication had existed in the days of Mahabharata. How could Sanjaya (the charioteer of King Dhritarashtra in the epic) give a detailed account and description to the blind king about the battle of Kurukshetra? It means internet was there, the satellites and that technology was there in this country at that time”

> Mr Deb said that while European nations and the United States may claim to have invented the internet, the technology mostly began in India and was built by its people.

> "Internet and satellite system had existed in India lakhs of years ago. The richest culture belongs to our nation and I feel proud of it"

If you have some problem, mention it.

Don't pick up things from some where and say related.

There were always some people who talk rubbish, there is no need for you to take the job of spreading it.

You're aware that both European languages and Sanskrit have a common ancestor, Proto-Indo-European? That's how you find identical wordstems like "Pa" for father in both (if I remember the example correctly). Something as basic as soup would be easy to imagine going back to PIE no?

of course but PIE is an imagined language with an imaginary date of 2500 BC

lack of any attestation kills all PIE claims

whereas sanskrit is a solidly real language with a lot of evidence that it dates back to 4th millennium BC or even much further back for the rg veda

evidence that is vociferously ignored or censored in the west for various reasons

so the tactic of making sanskrit a daughter language of PIE is not accepted

So if you don’t accept PIE, what‘s the model you accept? Did Indian and European peoples migrate out of Africa separately according to your model? Using languages to analyze this is indeed a crude tool, but we have something better now: DNA evidence. And so far I at least never heard of DNA being used to disproof the Indo-European relationship, as opposed to some other hypothetical proto-people like Finno-Ugric-Mongolian-Korean-Japanese, whathever the name for that was.

You seem to be a bit emotionally attached to this? I for one like imagining that such a vast and diverse bunch of peoples may go back to just a couple of families crossing deserts, jungles and plains together.

there is no dna that encodes for language

how europeans got their language is not our problem

neither the yamnaya r1b z2103 nor sintashta r1a z2125 amounted to much in world history and the sintashtans were just scythians or what we called shakas

these geneticists are just looking for keys under the streetlight ignoring actual evidence

rest of the dna debate is massively hyped propaganda and search for relevance and funding

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