Curry is not a dish. It is a verb — something that happens when a spice tradition travels and lands in new soil, adapts to what's available, and gets claimed by whoever is cooking it next. This feature, built around four recipes from four distinct curry traditions (Malaysian, Caribbean, Japanese, and at least one more truncated by the source), makes that argument implicitly through the food itself rather than stating it directly, which is the right call. Mandy Yin's Malaysian chicken and squash curry is the strongest piece here because it does the most work. The swap from Dad's lamb-and-potato to chicken thighs and butternut squash is not laziness — it is a demonstration of how Mamak Tamil Muslim cooking already incorporated substitution as technique. Yin names the empat sekawan (the four friends: star anise, cassia, cloves, cardamom) and explains why bone-in matters, why you cook the meat in the same pot as the sauce from the start, why the squash earns its place by drinking up the gravy. This is recipe writing that actually teaches you to think, not just to execute steps. Keshia Sakarah's curry crab with cassava dumplings and roasted corn is the most historically dense contribution. She does the thing good food writers do: she names the mechanism of arrival. Indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent brought spice culture to the Caribbean and it transformed the cuisine. She then traces the regional divergence — colombo in Guadeloupe (toasted rice in the spice blend, lime juice acidifying the sauce), versus the roti-shop curries of central Trinidad where generations of Indian communities settled. The recipe itself is technically demanding: cassava flour dumplings, blended-and-sieved curry base, crab meat folded in at the end so it doesn't break. This is restaurant-level technique packaged as a home cook's feature. Tim Anderson's garlic mushroom curry doria — the Japanese rice gratin — arrives as the feature's formal surprise. Japan's curry is itself a migration story (arriving via British naval rations in the Meiji era, adapted through S&B curry powder into something entirely distinct), and Anderson uses the doria format specifically because its mildness makes it a blank slate. The piece is truncated in the source material, but the framing is smart: comfort food as a category that curry has successfully colonized in Japan on its own terms. What this feature does well, structurally, is resist the flattening move that food media usually makes with 'world curries' roundups. It doesn't pretend these dishes share an essence beyond the word. Each contributor is writing from inside a tradition — Yin from Malaysian Chinese-Indian hybrid cooking, Sakarah from Caribbean-British perspective, Anderson from his deep knowledge of Japanese food — and each tradition has a specific history of how spice got there and what it became. The feature is more interesting than its format suggests. The practical utility is high. All three recipes are genuinely executable at home, and the headnotes carry real information: the Adabi/Baba's curry powder note, the amchar masala link, the cassava flour instruction. The shopping guidance is honest about substitution. The one structural weakness is that the feature feels incomplete — four recipes promised in the headline, and the fourth appears to be cut off mid-sentence. Whatever Tim Anderson's doria actually instructs the reader to do is absent from the source.
