Peel and core 4 sour apples and cut into rings; then sprinkle with curry-powder and let fry until tender. Add a few thinly cut shallots. Cover and let simmer until done. Serve on a platter with boiled rice and pour over a curry sauce.
July 17 — No. 17
Indian
A terse late-Victorian sketch rather than a worked recipe: the fat, the quantity of curry powder and the curry sauce are all left to the cook. A few decisions need making before you start.
- The missing fat"Let fry" assumes a spoonful or two of butter, ghee or clarified drippings already in the pan. Use about 2 tablespoons of butter or ghee for four apples in a wide skillet, over medium heat.
- How much curry powderReckon on 1 to 2 teaspoons total for four apples, sprinkled over the rings as they go into the pan. Bloom it in the fat rather than dusting it on at the end, or the raw spice will taste dusty and chalky.
- Sour applesA firm cooking apple that holds its shape: Granny Smith, Northern Spy. Avoid Bramley, which breaks down to a puree, and sweet dessert apples, which collapse and leave nothing to lay out on the platter.
- Rings, not wedgesCore the apples whole with an apple corer and cut crosswise into rings about 1/2 inch thick. Thinner rings fall apart when turned; thicker ones will not soften before the outsides brown.
- ShallotsTwo or three, sliced paper-thin. They are added after the apples have begun to soften so they steam rather than scorch in the spiced fat.
- The hingeTotal cooking is short. Something like 4 to 5 minutes a side, then covered and simmered perhaps 5 minutes more. "Until done" here means tender enough to yield to a knife while the ring still lifts off the pan in one piece.
- The curry sauceNone is given. A plain sauce of onion sweated in butter, curry powder, flour and stock, simmered ten minutes and strained, is in keeping with the period; a modern coconut-milk curry sauce works too but tastes considerably less Anglo-Indian.
- YieldFour apples with rice serve two as a light main dish or four as a side alongside a plainer curry or cold meat.
This belongs to the Anglo-Indian cooking that British households brought home from the subcontinent, where "curry" had become a broad English category for anything cooked with a bought curry powder. Fruit curries were a familiar part of that repertoire, and apple in particular may well have suited a British kitchen where mango and tamarind were hard to come by, though the pairing of sour fruit with spice and a starch is genuinely Indian in spirit. The book's format, one dish a day from a different nation, reflects a period taste for culinary tourism at the domestic table, and its recipes are correspondingly brief, aimed at cooks assumed to know already how to fry an apple and make a sauce.