Cut a spring chicken into pieces at the joints; season with salt and pepper and fry in hot lard with some tender mutton chops. Fry 1 sliced onion in hot butter with 2 ounces of rice, 1 teaspoonful of curry-powder and 1 chopped apple; add to the chicken. Moisten with 1 quart of chicken broth, season to taste and let simmer until the chicken and mutton are very tender; then add 1 pint of hot oysters and the juice of ½ lemon. Let all get very hot and serve on a platter with fried egg-plant.
A composite Anglo-Indian stew rather than anything cooked in Madras, and it works if you treat the oysters as a finish rather than an ingredient to be stewed. A few of the measures and cuts need translating.
- Oysters last, and brieflyShucked oysters need only a minute or two in the hot liquid, until the edges just curl. Anything longer and they shrink and turn rubbery. A pint of shucked oysters is roughly 2 cups; the count varies with size, somewhere in the region of two dozen.
- Spring chickenA young bird of about 2 to 2.5 lb. A modern 3 lb chicken cut into eight pieces is the closest thing; bone-in thighs alone also work and hold up better to the long simmer.
- Mutton chopsMutton is sheep meat from an animal over a year old (often over two), strongly flavoured and rarely sold in the US. Lamb shoulder chops or cubed lamb shoulder are the practical substitute, though milder. Two chops, or about 3/4 lb, is in scale with the chicken.
- The riceTwo ounces is roughly a scant 1/3 cup dry. It goes in with the onion and curry powder to toast, then thickens the quart of broth into something between a soup and a stew. Long-grain, not short.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of this period were generally mild and turmeric-forward. Modern blends vary a great deal; taste yours and increase to a tablespoon if it is gentle, and give it a full minute in the fat with the onion to lose its raw edge.
- FatLard for the chicken and mutton is period-correct and gives good browning; neutral oil or ghee is fine. Brown the meats in batches so they sear rather than steam.
- Simmer timeReckon 40 to 50 minutes at a bare simmer for the lamb to go tender, with the chicken pieces pulled out earlier if they are done first. The rice will be soft well before the lamb.
- Fried egg-plantSalt sliced eggplant for 20 minutes, blot dry, and fry in shallow oil until golden. Doing this while the stew simmers is the only way to get it crisp on the platter.
- YieldServes four to six as written. The recipe adds the lemon juice before the final heating; adding it off the heat instead keeps it brighter.
This is Anglo-Indian cooking as it reached Western kitchens: a generic "Indian" label attached to a dish built on curry powder, apple and a spoonful of rice, the same vocabulary that produced mulligatawny and country captain in the same era. Commercial curry powder was a British trade product, a fixed blend standing in for the shifting spice mixtures of South Indian households, and by 1900 it was on grocers' shelves across Europe and America. The apple and the mutton belong to that Anglo tradition rather than to Tamil cooking, and the pint of oysters at the end belongs to neither: oysters were cheap and abundant in American cities at the turn of the century and were dropped into soups, stuffings and stews as freely as mushrooms are now. Books like this one, offering a dish a day from a different nation, were selling novelty to home cooks who would rarely meet the originals, and the recipes tell you more about the American pantry of the period than about the places named at the top.