Peel and fry some small onions. Add 2 stalks of celery, cut into inch pieces; sprinkle with salt, pepper and curry-powder; add a few truffles and pour over all 1 cup of stock. Let stew until tender. Then boil some potatoes; mash smooth with butter and season with curry sauce. Place a border of mashed potatoes on a platter and put the stew in the centre; serve hot. Garnish with fried parsley.
A terse turn-of-the-century vegetable stew that assumes you already know how to build a curry. The quantities are left almost entirely to the cook, so treat the text as a method and scale it to your pan.
- QuantitiesNothing is given but the 2 stalks of celery and 1 cup of stock. For four servings as a light main, figure 12 small onions or shallots, the celery, about 2 lb potatoes for the border, and 1 to 2 teaspoons curry powder.
- "Fry" the onions properlyThis is the hinge of the dish. Small whole onions want gentle browning in butter over eight to ten minutes, not a quick sear; they carry most of the sweetness in a stew with no meat in it.
- Bloom the curry powderThe recipe sprinkles curry powder over raw vegetables and then adds liquid. Commercial curry powder tastes dusty unless it meets hot fat first, so let it toast in the pan with the onions for thirty seconds before the stock goes in.
- TrufflesThe recipe stews 'a few truffles' in with the vegetables; truffles were a plausible luxury touch in a book of this period and are an expensive purchase now. Omit them, or substitute a handful of sliced cremini or a few rehydrated dried porcini with a spoonful of their soaking liquid.
- StockUnqualified 'stock' in books of this period usually meant a meat broth, most often veal or beef, though the term was used loosely. Vegetable stock will keep the dish meatless if you want it so; use something well seasoned, since a cup of thin liquid is all the sauce there is.
- "Curry sauce" in the potatoesThe recipe assumes a prepared curry sauce the cook already has; in books of this era that generally meant a thickened, curry-seasoned sauce, but the text does not specify. Simplest modern substitute: beat a little curry powder and a spoonful of the stew liquid into the mashed potato.
- Cooking timeCelery cut in inch pieces is tender in 15 to 20 minutes of gentle simmering; whole small onions need 25 to 30. Start the onions first or the celery will collapse.
- Fried parsleyWhole dry sprigs dropped into 350F fat for 15 to 20 seconds, then drained on paper. The parsley must be bone dry or the fat will spit violently.
- ServingThe mashed potato border is meant to hold a fairly loose stew, so keep the potatoes stiff rather than creamy. Serves four as a supper dish.
The "Oriental" label in an American cookbook of this period rarely pointed at a specific cuisine; it generally signalled curry powder, which had by then been sold ready-blended in Britain and America for a long time and was used as a seasoning rather than as the basis of a South Asian spice technique. Books of the day-by-day format were compiled to solve the daily menu problem, one dish for each day of the year, and their national attributions were often gestures toward variety rather than claims of authenticity. The plating is also of its moment: a piped or spooned border of mashed potato around a central stew was a common restaurant presentation of the period, following French practice.