What Is The Curry House Website and What Curry Resources Does It Offer?

The Curry House (curryhouse.co.uk) is a British curry resource site built around restaurant-style curry recipes, Indian restaurant terminology, and historical writing about curry in Britain. It is most useful if you want to cook British Indian restaurant-style dishes at home, look up what a menu term like bhuna or dhansak actually means, or read about how curry became part of British food culture. The site's own navigation lists free recipes, books, FAQ, glossary, news & reports, and articles, so you can go straight to the section that matches what you need.

What the site covers

The site describes itself around curry, curry recipes, restaurant-style curries, free recipes, and a curry cookbook, with supporting reference material on Indian restaurant terms and spices. Its scope is narrower than a general recipe site: it is aimed at British curry cooking and the vocabulary you meet in Indian restaurants, not at a broad international recipe index.

Recipes and the restaurant-style approach

The recipe side of the site is framed as "restaurant-style curries" and "Quick Meals from The Curry House," which tells you the intended style: dishes that resemble what you would order in a British Indian restaurant rather than strictly traditional regional home cooking. The keyword set around the site points to the dishes you can expect to find, including tandoori, chicken tikka masala, bhuna, dhansak, and rogan josh.

If you are choosing where to start, pick by the dish you already like rather than by technique. Someone who orders chicken tikka masala in restaurants will get more out of that recipe first; someone who wants a drier, thicker curry should look at bhuna; someone who wants a lentil-based dish should look at dhansak. The glossary is the companion tool here — if a recipe name is unfamiliar, the glossary of Indian restaurant curries is where the site explains it.

Glossary: curries, terms, and spices

The site keeps separate glossaries for Indian restaurant terms, Indian restaurant curries, and spices. That split is practical: curry names tell you what dish you are ordering or cooking, while the spice glossary tells you what goes into it. Use the curry glossary when a menu or recipe name is unclear, and the spice glossary when you are shopping or substituting an ingredient. This is the section to check before cooking if you are working from a restaurant menu rather than a written recipe.

Books and historical articles

Beyond recipes, the site publishes history. Its featured title, How to Get a Curry in Victorian London, is described as a 65-page paperback at £5.99, with a Kindle edition at £1.99. The description explains its angle: curry's British popularity grew from East India Company officers and officials who ate spicy meals in India and wanted the same food back home, with Queen Victoria helping popularise Indian food through her own Indian chefs. The book covers gentlemen's clubs, high-class hotel restaurants, spice warehouses, public curry-making demonstrations, and cookery schools — and notes that access depended on social class, gender, and wealth, with spices too expensive for the working classes and women not socially able to dine out without a male escort until the 1880s.

The site also carries a profile of Agnes Marshall, described as a cookery school founder, author of four best-selling cookery books, inventor of improvements to ice cream-making machinery, founder of the weekly newspaper The Table, and a popular lecturer — famous in her day alongside Mrs Beeton but largely forgotten since. These articles suit readers interested in food history rather than cooking a meal tonight.

How to start, depending on what you want

• You want to cook tonight: go to the free recipes section and pick a dish you already order in restaurants, such as chicken tikka masala, bhuna, dhansak, or rogan josh.
• You are staring at a restaurant menu: use the glossary of Indian restaurant curries for the dish names and the spice glossary for ingredients.
• You want background reading: start with the articles section, then the Victorian London book if the period interests you.
• You want to follow British curry news: the news & reports section is the relevant one.

One practical note: the site presents its recipes as free, but the books are paid publications with the prices stated above. Nothing on the site indicates that the books are included with the free recipe content, so treat them as separate purchases.