Ballpark Curry

A lot of curry spices are old friends--cumin, ginger, cinnamon, mustard, chile pepper. But not the two used most abundantly: turmeric and coriander. They’re so uncommon in this country that a lot of us aren’t even sure how to pronounce “turmeric” (it’s TUR-mer-ic, everybody).

The Greeks and Romans used coriander, though the Greeks claimed it smelled like bedbugs (which is what koriandron meant in Greek). It was the chief spice in the medieval Arab world, because of a medical theory that you have to balance “heating” and “cooling” foods, coriander being the only “cooling” spice. But it was only moderately popular in medieval Europe, and today it’s rarely used there except for sausages and pickles. About the only place you see coriander in traditional American food is in those little packets of pickling spices.

Of course, we’ve taken to using coriander greens (cilantro) a lot. And jawbreaker-type candies used to have a coriander seed in the middle, a tradition going back to the Renaissance when these sugar balls were called comfits (in the 18th and 19th centuries, they were called sugar plums, and now you know what Tchaikovsky’s sugar plum fairy was made out of).

Turmeric started out strong in the Western world. To the Babylonians, it wasn’t a bright yellow, less aromatic cousin of ginger, it was the major spice, and ginger was called mountain turmeric (kurkanu sha shadi). But it’s only a marginal ingredient to us, providing a yellow color in some pickles.

And in mustard. Turmeric is why American mustard doesn’t have the dull color of, say, Dijon mustard. And what do we put mustard on? Hot dogs, of course--the only traditional American food flavored with coriander (plus a little garlic and paprika). Throw on some cumin, minced ginger and cinnamon, and you’d have curry on a bun there, pally.