- The earliest known recipe for meat in spicy sauce with bread appeared on tablets found near Babylon in Mesopotamia, written in cuniform text as discovered by the Sumerians, and dated around 1700
 B.C., probably as an offering to the god Marduk.
- The hot red pepper (chilli) was discovered by Christopher Columbus in Santa Domingo in 1492. The Portuguese introduced it into Cochin and Calicut in South India in 1501 where it was called the Goan Pepper.
- Britain's first Indian restaurant opened in 1809, called the Hindustani Coffee House located in London's Portman Square.
- In 1846 William Makepiece Thackray wrote a 'Poem to Curry' in his Kitchen Melodies.
- The world's hottest spice is the Naga Jolokia, or Tezpur from Assam measuring 850,000 Scoville units (a scientific method for measuring the level of capsaicin, the fiery chemical in chillies, in a given pepper). To put this into context, a sweet bell pepper measures 0 and a Jalapeño pepper scores 2,500-5000 Scoville units.
- Mrs Beeton's 'Book of Household Management' boasts 14 curry recipes.
- The word curry is thought to derive from the Tamil word "kari" meaning spiced sauce.
- Queen Victoria had an India
n chef called Abdul Karim who had to prepare a curry each day in the event she had a visitor from India.
- The interest in spicy food from India in Britain began to disappear after the Sepoy Mutiny in 1857 and the founding of the India National Congress in 1885. By the early 1900s British goods were being banned in India and thus, temporarily, ended the love affair with Indian cuisine in favour of French.
- The tandoor first came to Britain 'on loan' after appearing at the USA World's Fair and was then installed in The Gaylord in Mortimer Street, London in 1966.
- Chicken Tikka Massala is the most popular dish in the UK with 23 million portions sold every year in Indian restaurants - enough to feed our old Wembley Stadium filled to capacity, two meals a day for over two months.
- The largest onion bhaji ever created weighed 59.6 kg (131 lb) and had a diameter of 80 cm (31 in). It was made on November, 8, 1999, by three chefs at the Veena Indian Cuisine Restaurant and Takeaway, Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, UK.
- Indian restaurants in Britain serve about 2.5 million customers every week and the UK Indian food industry turns over more than £3.5 billion annually.
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