Home › Poultry › Chicken Curried
Chicken Curried
Prepare chicken as for fricassee. When chicken has stewed a few minutes stir into it while on the fire a mixture of half a tablespoonful of currie powder, braided into a tablespoonful of butter and seasoned with pepper and salt to taste. Let it boil a minute and serve with boiled rice on a separate dish.
A brief, late-Victorian American take on curry: essentially a chicken fricassee finished with curry butter. The instructions assume you already know the fricassee, so most of the work is filling in what is left unsaid.
- "Prepare as for fricassee"Joint a 3-4 lb chicken, season it, and stew it gently in just enough water or light stock to cover, with an onion and a bay leaf if you like. Barely simmering for 45-60 minutes gives tender meat; a hard boil makes the breast stringy.
- "Braided" butterMost likely a variant of "brayed," i.e. pounded or worked together. Mash the curry powder into softened butter to a smooth paste so it disperses instead of floating in spots.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the period were typically dominated by turmeric and coriander, with fenugreek, cumin, ginger, pepper and cayenne in varying proportions, and were generally used in small quantities as a seasoning rather than as the body of a sauce. Half a tablespoon for a whole chicken will read as mild and faintly yellow; add more to taste if you expect the heat of a modern curry.
- Bloom the spiceRaw curry powder stirred into liquid tastes dusty. The minute of boiling the recipe calls for is the bare minimum — better to cook the curry butter in a small pan for 30-60 seconds until fragrant before it goes into the pot.
- ThickeningThe butter alone will not thicken anything. If you want a sauce that clings, work an equal weight of flour into the curry butter and let the stew simmer 3-4 minutes after it goes in, or reduce the cooking liquid first.
- Timing of the addition"Stewed a few minutes" is vague and, taken literally, adds the spice far too early for a long braise. Adding it in the last five to ten minutes keeps the aroma; a full hour of simmering flattens it.
- The riceServing rice in a separate dish is common in nineteenth-century English and American curry recipes. The recipe specifies only 'boiled rice'; boiled and drained dry rather than creamy suits the dish.
- YieldOne chicken with rice serves four.
Curried chicken had been in English and American household books for well over a century by the late nineteenth century, arriving through the East India trade and the returning families of the British service; by then commercial curry powder was widely sold and needed no explanation to a reader. What this entry shows is how thoroughly the dish had been absorbed into the Anglo-American repertoire: it is not treated as a foreign recipe at all, but as a variation on fricassee, the ordinary stewed-chicken method of the American kitchen, with a spiced butter stirred in at the end. The separate dish of boiled rice — kept apart from the meat rather than cooked with it, as in a pilau or biryani — is a common nineteenth-century table arrangement for curries, and the small quantity of powder suggests a taste in which the spice was an accent rather than the point of the dish.