There is nothing in the world quite like going for a curry. I don’t know what it is, whether it’s the first ccrack! of the poppadums before you pile on the mango chutney, the creeping heat that makes your eyes bulge or even the persistent, residual orange oil under your fingernails from scooping it all up with a floppy naan. But it’s unbeatable.

In acknowledgment of the British love affair with curry, the Grosvenor House hotel in Park Lane, London, recently hosted the second British Curry Awards. This glittering affair, made all the more so by the sprinkling of saris and gold necklaces that flashed amid the sea of dinner suits, is the baby of the Bengali restaurateur Enam Ali. In the business for almost 20 years, he is probably the most enthusiastic curry fan you’ll ever meet.

He recalls his early days. “It was difficult in the beginning. Recognition was nothing because restaurants were always treated as ‘just a curry house’,” he says in his lilting Sylheti accent. (Sylhet is a city in Bangladesh, where the overwhelming majority of Bangladeshis in the UK come from.) “But our community is creating such wonderful cuisine that now the whole world is enjoying it. It’s not coming directly from India, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, it is born here.”

Herein lies the key to the success of curry in Britain. Offer a chicken tikka masala, of which we eat about 18 tons a week, to a Gujarati or Punjabi person freshly arrived from the subcontinent and they are likely to recoil in horror. The dishes that we love so much are not “Indian” in any true sense. Their origins lie early in the 19th century and the burra khanas (big dinners) of the British East India Company’s agents, or Anglo-Indians as they styled themselves.

According to Lizzie Collingham’s excellent book Curry: A Tale of Cooks and Conquerors, it didn’t take long for their Indian cooks to start adapting regional dishes to British tastes. Further transformations took place when the first wave of East India Company officials retired and returned to Britain.

They continued to put curry on the smart tables of Britain, while coffee houses up and down the country enthusiastically served up approximations of khichari (kedgeree) and masala omelette. Curry had arrived.

It is a long fast-forward to the dishes we consume in vast quantities today, but the British love for curry has only grown. And with it, the industry. There are now nearly 10,000 “spice restaurants” in the UK and they turn over more than £2 billion a year.

Despite this massive commercial success, however, the curry industry remains in constant flux.As consumers become more discriminating, restaurateurs such as Ali, Iqbal Mahad and his chef Vivek Singh (the Cinnamon Club) and Cyrus Todiwala (Café Spice Namaste, Chor Bizarre) get more creative. The menus incorporate ingredients and techniques not just from all over Asia, but the rest of the world.

Ali estimates that maybe 40 per cent of the menu at his award-winning Surrey restaurant, Le Raj, was “born in Epsom”. This spirit of experimentation is spreading. Curry certainly has the support of the British public. Think on this: when you last went on holiday abroad, what did you miss? That’s right.

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