Cook some venison, well seasoned, until tender and slice thin. Peel and slice 2 apples and 1 Spanish onion; season and fry until a light brown. Add 1 cooked carrot sliced thin, some savory herbs, and 1 cup of mutton broth; cover and let cook fifteen minutes. Then mix ½ ounce of butter with ½ tablespoonful of curry-powder and 1 tablespoonful of lemon-juice; add to the sauce with the sliced venison; cover and let simmer ten minutes; then add 1 tablespoonful of currant jelly. Let get very hot and serve, garnished with fried croutons and sliced lemon.
This is a made-over dish built on venison that has already been cooked — a curried reheat of yesterday's roast, in the Anglo-Indian manner. The quantities are loose in the original, so a few decisions have to be made before you start.
- Quantities and yieldNo weight of venison is given. About 1 to 1½ lb of cooked meat, sliced thin, balances the 2 apples, onion, carrot and cup of broth, and serves four. Scale the sauce rather than the meat if you have less.
- The hinge: the meat is already cookedThe hinge: the venison is cooked through before it meets the sauce — the recipe has you cook it until tender and slice it thin at the start. It goes back in for the final ten minutes only, at a bare simmer: warmed through and glazed with sauce, not braised. Venison is very lean and turns dry and livery the moment it is pushed past hot.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon. Mashing the curry powder into it makes a rough compound butter that disperses through the sauce without leaving raw powdery grit — the period equivalent of blooming the spice.
- Spanish onionA large mild yellow onion, the sort sold as a sweet or Spanish onion. One will give roughly two to three cups sliced.
- Mutton brothGenuine mutton stock is hard to buy now. Lamb stock is the nearest thing; a good beef stock, or stock made from the venison bones, works and is less assertive.
- Curry powderA half tablespoon of a commercial blend, which around the turn of the century generally meant a turmeric- and coriander-heavy mixture rather than a modern hot one. A modern hot Madras blend at the same measure will overwhelm the apple and jelly; use a mild curry powder or cut the quantity.
- ApplesChoose an apple that holds its shape when fried — a firm eating apple rather than a cooker, which will collapse into the onions in the first few minutes.
- Currant jellyRed currant jelly, stirred in at the end; the recipe then has the dish get very hot before serving. With the lemon juice it supplies the sweet-sour edge that carries the dish; without it the curry sits flat.
- ServingCroutons fried in butter and thin lemon slices around the edge. Rice is not mentioned in the recipe.
Dishes labelled "Hindu" or "Indian" in English and American cookbooks of this period rarely came from India; they came from the Anglo-Indian household kitchen, where curry powder was a pantry staple used to make cold roast meat interesting a second time. Commercial curry powders had been sold in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and curry powder sat in the larder alongside the currant jelly that traditionally accompanied venison. What you have here is an English made-over dish — a spoonful of jelly — with curry powder standing in for the nation named in the title. That is characteristic of the day-a-page cookbook genre, which promised a world tour from a single household's spice shelf and delivered, for the most part, familiar British and American cookery given a national badge.