Soup curry Period BOrigin theory BVerified

Soup curry, unlike the thick curry familiar across Japan, is served as a broth, with a chicken leg and deep-fried vegetables set into a thin, spiced soup. It was born in Sapporo and became widely known as the city's specialty in the 2000s.

Curry itself had become thoroughly at home in Japan, and curry powder had been in use in the country long before this dish appeared. The familiar curry, served not as a thick sauce but as a thin soup with chicken and vegetables set into it, first appeared in this form in Sapporo in the second half of the twentieth century.

The prototype is traced to the yakuzen curry served in 1971 by Ajanta, a coffee shop that opened in Sapporo. The owner combined a family recipe of Chinese medicinal cooking with Indian food, and at first it was simply a soup with rice and no solid ingredients. Around 1975, as customers asked for more, bone-in chicken legs and large pieces of vegetable were added, and it moved closer to the form we know today.

When was soup curry born? The question needs splitting in two: when the prototype took shape, and when the name was fixed.

On the prototype there is a settled account: it traces to the yakuzen curry served by Ajanta, a coffee shop that opened in Sapporo in 1971. Ajanta's own record states that at first it was simply a soup with rice and no solid ingredients, and that around 1975 chicken legs were added, bringing it close to today's form. In substance, the dish was essentially complete at this point.

The name soup curry, however, first appears in print later, in 1993, at the opening of Magic Spice. Before that there was no shared name, and each shop sold its own under its own label, as Ajanta did with yakuzen curry. It was only after this naming that soup curry became established as a genre and, in the 2000s, spread widely as Sapporo's local specialty.

The point to keep in mind is that 1993 is not the year the dish was born. It is only the earliest date at which the name can be confirmed; the prototype had appeared some twenty years before. The prototype was born in the early 1970s, the name was fixed in 1993, and so came the soup curry of today.