Originally Posted by
vasantn
Have you ever seen any of these ingredients added to veal marsala or fettucine alfredo? Adding basil, thyme and oregano does not make a dish Italian. Similarly, throwing curry powder onto something does not make it Indian.
The fact that there are hundreds of different "curries" should make it obvious that a single "curry powder" could hardly be an ingredient of most of them.
Well, you can look at it that way. Or you can say, "I'm likely to need basil and oregano if I want to make an Italian dish". And you can say "If I'm making an Indian dish, I'll probably need turmeric. Yeh, taking cream of mushroom soup and flavoring it with turmeric doesn't make it Indian. But I can testify that adding "Indian spices" to un-Indian dishes sometimes improves them a lot. Heck, Betty Crocker discovered that maybe 80 years ago.