Make mine a Curry

Excellent review by William Grimes in today's New York Times of Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, by Lizzie Collingham.

What could be more Indian than chilies? Yet before the Portuguese arrived at the beginning of the 15th century, Indians had never seen or tasted a chili, a New World spice that Columbus called "pepper of the Indies." The heat in Indian dishes came from a red pepper known as long pepper or from the black pepper familiar in the West.
In addition to chilies, the Portuguese brought carne de vinho e alhos, or pork cooked slowly in wine vinegar and garlic. Local cooks in Goa, Portugal's trading headquarters, reinterpreted the dish. They fashioned an ersatz vinegar from tamarind, and threw in lots of spices, especially chilis. Thus vindaloo, a corruption of vinho e alhos, was born, and with it a new traditional Indian food.
Ms. Collingham, the author of "Imperial Bodies: The Physical Experience of the Raj," ranges far and wide. Her subject is much larger, in fact, than curry. She traces the evolution of Indian cuisine, its often bizarre cultural exchanges with the invading British and its eventual export to the world outside. She roams geographically from the northwest frontier to the shores of Sri Lanka, and historically from the culinary innovations of the Mughals in the 15th century to the triumph of chicken tikka masala, which Robin Cook, the British foreign minister, hailed as the new British national dish in 2001. Along the way, she sometimes loses the narrative thread, but the byways and even the dead ends tend to be intriguing.
Curry is not, strictly speaking, Indian at all. It is a British invention. From the Portuguese, the early British traders learned to apply the word "caril," or "carree," incorrectly, to sauces made from butter, crushed nuts, spices and fruits that were then poured over rice. (In various South Indian languages, "karil" or "kari" referred to spices for seasoning or to dishes of sautéed vegetables or meat.) Eventually, the word evolved into a catchall. "Curry became not just a term that the British used to describe an unfamiliar set of Indian stews and ragouts," Ms. Collingham writes, "but a dish in its own right, created for the British in India."

Read more: New York Times
A quick check of the Guardian shows that the book was published in the UK in August 2005, with the title Curry: A Biography. The Guardian's reviewer, Kathryn Hughes, it has to be said, turns out a bit of a dog's dinner: Guardian
What else? The NYT review mentions the culinary impact of the Jesuits in Goa, India, in the 1400s. It has been a habit of mine at dinner parties, for some years now, to openly speculate about the impact the Portuguese had on Chinese cuisine.
After all, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in southern China in 1582, in Beijing in 1601, and died in Beijing in 1610. What link, if any, did Ricci, or other Jesuit missionaries, have with today's spicy, chillied, hot Sichuan/Szechuan cuisine? Still no answer, yet.
Heck, a bit more of Grimes:

In their clueless search for palatable food, the British managed to invent curry powder, Worcestershire sauce and ketchup (made from mushrooms until tomatoes became popular in the 19th century). Most impressively, they also turned India, where scarcely a cup of tea was drunk before 1900, into a nation of avid tea drinkers.

No mention of Marmite or Weetabix, though.