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 Curries are a hybrid of cultural and culinary influences. Not long after Vasco da Gama arrived in India, Portuguese ships brought chilies they had acquired in America from the Spanish conquerors of Mexico. The indigenous spices of India, including their own black pepper and chili peppers, had been nothing like as hot as this new red pepper (or cayenne). But red chilies soon conquered India: no other country consumes as many. While Telugu-speaking people say that the hottest curries of India are in Vijayawada, a city in the Krishna Delta not far from Bay of Bengal, Vijayawada people say that even hotter curries can be found in Tadikonda, a few miles away. A visiting missionary executive from New York compared the taste to putting a Bunsen burner in one's mouth—and when he tried to put out the fire with water, he found that this only increased the heat. What cools such heat is milk, curd, banana, or plain rice.
Vindaloo originated when tamarind and spices, especially chilies, were mixed with Portuguese carne de vinho e alhos. Cooks of the Grand Mughals, coming from nomadic encampments in Central Asia but already refined by Persian tastes, developed biryani. This combined fragrant forms of fried basmati rice, known as pillau (elsewhere known as pilaf), with pungent spices and meats, especially chicken or lamb, nuts, and raisins. In its finest form, a royal feast of diwani-biryani or nabawi-pillau was followed by sweets (halwa, mittai, or laddu) covered with purest gold or silver. Kormas (quararamas) of Lucknow, with meat marinated in curds, spices, and ghee (clarified liquid butter that does not spoil), evolved in the north and west. Fish curry dishes developed along the shorelines, especially in the Sundarbans of Bengal. Curries, in various forms, came out of a blending of Tamil and Telugu cultures in the south. Every local culture within the subcontinent, from Kashmir to Kaniya Kumari (Cape Comerin), evolved its own unique forms of cuisine—and its own curries.
Curry's conquest of the world began with the conquest of India by the East India Company. Madras curry in its various forms (the word deriving from the Tamil kari and the Telugu kara, as also from similar sounding terms in Kannada and Malayalam), became the most hybrid and ubiquitous of all India's spicy (masala) sauces and stews. Normally this was served with rice in the south and with soft wheat breads such as chapattis, parathas, puris, or simple nan in the north. The author is not quite correct when she says that the British invented curry: there is not a respectable household anywhere in the countryside that does not produce its own unique curries, with secrets handed down from mother to daughter. But it is true that, starting in Madras, a hybrid Anglo-Indian cuisine spread and became ubiquitous, not only throughout all of the subcontinent (including Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka), but gradually throughout the rest of Asia and Africa, and finally to Europe and the Americas.
 The earliest, most elegant, and famous Indian restaurant abroad is Veeraswamy's of London (just off Upper Regent Street), founded by a descendant of William Palmer, who flourished in Hyderabad in the early 19th century. But this fabulous eatery is a far cry from the "curry and chips" shops that spread into every high street and leaped the Atlantic to our own shores. The world conquest of curry became manifest in 2001 when Robin Cook, the then-foreign minister, declared chicken tikka masala to be the new national dish of Great Britain. In curry's wake have come many other common condiments and relishes long since known in the West: chutney, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, and various forms of curry powder.
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