When food is curried, it has been cooked with a mix of hot, fragrant spices — the kind English broadly calls curry. Curried chicken, curried goat, curried potatoes: the word sits before the food and tells you the flavour, not what animal or vegetable it is. This is everyday menu language in British English and in many other places where “curry” is a familiar dish word. It is the -ed form of the cooking verb curry, used like an adjective. (There is another verb curry, to brush a horse; that sense of curried is rare for learners, and this entry is the spice one.) English “curry” is a wide label; it does not name one single recipe.