Naben Ruthnum's Curry is not so much about the comfort food we have all known to delight in, but the concept of curry in pop culture. Specifically, Ruthnum discusses the variations of curry as they appear in British and North American literature and media, by both diaspora writers like Lahiri and Rushdie, white authors like Elizabeth Gilbert, and shows like Gordon Ramsey's "Kitchen Nightmares". It is a deliciously mind boggling adventure that takes the reader around the globe in search of a simple question, "What is a curry?"

Yet as broad as the narration was, I would have liked more concrete history. I loved, for example, when Ruthnum discusses how the British invasion of Mughal India changed the components of North Indian curries as an export commodity. It would be interesting, perhaps, to see these ideas presented in a continuum, tracing the evolution and explosion of curry across the world.

Quotes:

"Before, or after, there was a curry. Vegetables, a thick sauce, rice I couldn't get the knack of clumping and thrusting into the sauce with the bird-beak grip my uncles and cousins demoed for me. It had been forks and knives up until this day as it would be afterwards. Tiny cuts I didn't know I had at the base of my cuticles tasted the curry as I did, the elements of sauce that bit my tongue taking a purchase in the blood there, leaving a sting that lasted."

"They exist as reflections the author's consciousness and culture, with culture processed through that consciousnesss."

"Curry is only definably Indian because India is a country that has the world in it."