Even though curries are strongly associated with Indian cuisine - and a wide range of other Southern and South-eastern Asian cuisines, especially Thai, as well as dishes derived from them - curry is not, in fact, a word in any of the languages native to India, as it is an English word. It is believed that the word curry is derived from the Tamil word kari, which means "sauce." Curries have since spread across the world, often due to British influence, and today curries are incredibly popular in Britain itself, with chicken tikka masala being considered a British national dish.
All curries are made using spices, which can include leaves from the curry tree, but often doesn't, but just how spicy a curry is - its "heat" - can vary tremendously, from incredibly mild to potentially dangerous. Curries can be "wet," which means they are cooked in sauce, or "dry." As the world kari means sauce, there are suggestions that dry curries are not truly curries, as they are not cooked in sauce.
A chicken curry can be made from scratch, using raw chicken, but another popular way of making them is by using left over roast chicken and "currying" it - largely and traditionally, just adding the cooked chicken to a Western-style sauce flavoured with curry powder, which is a powder made from a mixture of different spices - which can get another meal or two from a chicken carcass. There are other types of curried chicken, such as the previously mentioned chicken tikka masala, as well as Coronation chicken, a cold sandwich filling that was invented for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. These are some of the most common British curried chicken dishes, but chicken can also be used in many other traditional recipes, and their Western adaptations.
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