Curry Powder?

Thank you to those who've emailed me about sticky rice & porcelain spoons. I like feedback. I recently received an email from my friend Irfan that intrigued me. He wanted to know what's up with curry powder. As someone who grew up eating Indian food, curry powder is something he'd never encountered before coming to Canada.
I would equate Irfan’s confusion about curry powder to my confusion over Minute Rice. How the heck did it get invented? And who uses the stuff?
Curry powder is a mixture of ground spices. I admit, I keep curry powder in my cupboard (mostly to use in Classy Chicken, which I will devote a whole blog entry to someday). My bottle of McCormick Hot Curry Powder lists the following ingredients: fenugreek, coriander, cumin, ginger, tumeric, celery seed, mace, red pepper, back pepper and dehydrated garlic. But I don’t think any self-respecting Indian home would have the stuff.
The word curry means is something akin to "sauce". Saag paneer and chicken tikka masala are two types of curries, but the variety and ratio of spices in each dish is different. The spices are precisely chosen and balanced. So no one would use a catch-all curry powder as seasoning. An Indian kitchen is stocked with separate containers of cumin, tumeric, cloves, cinnamon, and other spices.
So how did curry powder make its way into the picture then? Most seem to believe that its origins are British. And most believe its foundation is from the days of British colonialism in India. The Brits sought a way to bring the flavours of India back to Britain. The website menumagazine.co.uk gives a great history of curries. This part was particularly interesting:
In 1780 the first commercial curry powder appeared and in 1846 its fame was assured when William Makepeace Thackeray wrote a ‘Poem to Curry’ in his ‘ Kitchen Melodies’... Even Charles Ranhofer, chef at Delmonico’s (1862-98) wrote in The Epicurean "Curry - the best comes from India. An imitation is made of one ounce of coriander seeds, two ounces of cayenne, a quarter ounce of cardamom seeds, one ounce salt, two ounces turmeric, one ounce ginger, half an ounce of mace and a third of an ounce of saffron".
The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi "Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is".
Click here for the curry poem/recipe.