The Curry Quest

As a naïve twenty-one-year-old, I found myself enrolled in a college program in hotel, restaurant, and institutional management in my newly adopted country, the United States. I had arrived with a degree in chemistry, but was pretty clueless about cooking. At my neighborhood supermarket, which catered to a town of 10,000 locals and 2,000 students, I piled familiar potatoes, onions, and tomatoes into my cart and meandered over to the spice aisle. Ground cumin and turmeric were the only spices I instantly recognized from my mother’s Tamilian kitchen. A rectangular container, lurking alongside the cumin, caught my attention: Durkee Curry Powder. I had no idea what that meant.