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Such complexities, while not always fully explained in Lizzie Collingham's story of curry as a cuisine and its conquests, lie just beneath the surface. The result is a superb combination of culinary, cultural, and political history. While "curry" itself is never fully defined, what is presented is an exquisitely enlightening intellectual curry. Curry is a spicy sauce or stew—or, rather, it is a category of sauces containing an rich array of intricately blended ingredients. What these pages contain is an intermingling and layering of entertaining, fascinating, and vivid anecdotes and narratives that, in themselves, convey a history of the entire subcontinent. It is hard to imagine a more delicious way to gain an understanding of India's many cultures, peoples, and their history. Best of all, in almost every way, the fare is both pukka (genuine) and often insightful.

Discriminating between flavors and fragrances is not simple. Refined senses, sensations, and sensibilities—tastes—call for sophistication, a mingling of science and art. Cosmic properties and propensities are involved. Essentials of "heating" and "cooling" occur at three levels: physical, chemical, and cosmic (mystic or spiritual). Classical treatises codified over two thousand years ago in Aryuvedic principles govern what is a proper food for each occasion. "The idea of hot and cold foods to achieve a sublime blend of the six essential tastes (pungent, acidic, salty, sweet, astringent, and bitter)" lies at the heart of all cooking in India. Meat is heating. Milk, especially curd, is cooling—conducive to calm and cheerful contentment. Combining tamarind and pepper or chili peppers and condiments with hot water produces a hot broth or "pepper water" known as rasam, put on rice at the end of a meal but also drunk for health-giving or medical benefits (if only to clear sinuses). Curd and rice end the meal.

 Curries are a hybrid of cultural and culinary influences. Not long after Vasco ...

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