Cut 2 pounds of beefsteak into inch pieces. Sprinkle with salt, pepper and flour and fry until brown. Add 1 onion chopped fine and 1 tablespoonful of vinegar. Cover and let simmer with 1 tablespoonful of curry-powder and ½ cup of hot water until meat is tender. Thicken the sauce with flour and butter. Serve on a platter with a border of cooked rice sprinkled with chopped parsley and garnished with fried apple slices.
A plain Anglo-Indian braise of the sort that filled American cookbooks around 1900. It works, but the liquid and the spicing both want attention.
- The liquid is too littleHalf a cup of water will not carry two pounds of beef through the hour or more it needs to become tender in a covered pan. Check every twenty minutes and add hot water or stock as it reduces, keeping the meat about half submerged.
- Cut and cooking time"Beefsteak" here means a braising cut, not a tender one. Chuck or shin in 1-inch cubes will need 1½ to 2 hours at a bare simmer; a true steak cut this way turns to string.
- Bloom the curry powderCommercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty if it is simply stirred into liquid. Fry it in the pan fat with the onion for 30 to 60 seconds before the water goes in — the difference is larger than the quantity suggests.
- One tablespoon is mildPeriod curry powders were generally milder, turmeric-and-coriander-led blends. Modern jarred powders vary widely in heat; taste and adjust rather than assuming the single tablespoon is a fixed amount.
- Flouring twiceThe meat is already dredged in flour before browning, which thickens the sauce as it simmers. The final beurre manié of flour and butter is often unnecessary — judge the consistency first, and if you do use it, whisk it in off the heat and simmer a minute to cook out the raw flour.
- Fried apple slicesA sweet counterpoint of the kind common in Anglo-Indian cookery, though the recipe treats it as a garnish. Firm tart apples in rings, fried in butter until browned at the edges, can be served alongside rather than on the meat.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef serves four generously with the rice.
The book's premise — a dish a day, each labelled with a country — puts "Indian" beside French quail and caramel pudding, and what it delivers is not an Indian curry but the Anglo-Indian one that travelled back to Britain with returning colonial households and crossed to American tables from there. The tells are all present: a single commercial curry powder standing in for a ground spice mixture, a flour-thickened gravy, a ring of rice, and fried apple as the sweet counterpoint. Curry powder itself was a British commercial product, advertised for sale from the late eighteenth century onward, and its convenience is precisely why dishes like this one could appear in a general household cookbook with no other instruction. The vinegar may stand in for the sourness that tamarind or lime would supply in an Indian kitchen. Read as a period document rather than as a curry, it shows how thoroughly one commercial spice blend could stand for a subcontinent in the American pantry.