Chop 1 pound of raw beef; season with salt, pepper and 1 teaspoonful of curry-powder; add 2 stalks of chopped celery, 1 small onion and some chopped parsley. Mix with 2 beaten eggs and ½ cup of bread-crumbs, and make into small balls. Let cook in hot butter until tender. Serve on a border of boiled rice and pour over all a highly seasoned tomato-sauce.
A straightforward panfried meatball in curry seasoning; the original assumes you know how to chop, mix and fry, and leaves out quantities for the sauce and any sense of yield.
- "Raw beef" means ground beef"Raw beef" means uncooked meat -- the recipe specifies raw rather than the cooked leftovers that some period meat-ball recipes used up. Since the mixture is rolled into balls, read this as ground beef; 1 lb of 80/20 keeps the balls moist through frying.
- Chop the vegetables fineCelery and onion cut coarsely will stop the balls binding and leave crunchy pockets. Take them to a near-mince, or grate the onion, so the mixture holds together.
- The binder needs resting timeTwo eggs and half a cup of crumbs is a wet mix by modern standards. Let it sit 10-15 minutes so the crumbs hydrate, then wet your hands to roll the balls; chilling them briefly makes them far easier to handle in the pan.
- "Until tender" is the wrong cueBeef balls do not become tender with time, they dry out. Roll them about 1 inch, brown them in butter over medium heat and cook 8-10 minutes total, to 160F at the centre.
- Butter alone will scorchAt the heat needed to brown meat, butter blackens. Add a spoonful of neutral oil, or clarify the butter first, and wipe the pan between batches.
- Curry powder benefits from heatA teaspoon stirred cold into the meat tastes dusty. Toast it for 30 seconds in the butter you will fry in, or cook it briefly with the onion, then cool before mixing.
- The tomato sauce is left to youThe recipe gives no quantities or method. Garlic, onion, bay and a pinch of cayenne, reduced enough to coat, will read as "highly seasoned"; about 2 cups of sauce covers this quantity, and it can be built in the pan drippings after the balls come out.
- Rice border and yieldThe "border" is simply boiled rice pressed into a ring around the edge of a platter, meat heaped in the middle. Figure about 1 1/2 cups raw rice, and the pound of beef gives roughly 20 small balls, serving four.
The geography in books like this one was often nominal: the title on the page is "Egyptian Chop", the dish is a curried meatball on rice with tomato sauce, and the recipe would not look out of place in a British or American household manual of the same decade. Curry powder had been a staple of Anglo-American pantries since the nineteenth century, sold pre-blended in tins, and its presence was enough to mark a dish as broadly "Eastern" for a 1900s cook. There is a real family of Egyptian and wider Levantine meat patties behind the idea, most obviously the fried kofta of the eastern Mediterranean, but the celery, breadcrumbs, beaten egg and tomato sauce here belong squarely to the American table. What the page really documents is the daily-dish calendar format, one recipe per date through the year.