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Indian Dry Curry
2 pounds beef, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 onion, 2 tablespoons curry powder, 2 chopped gherkins, 1 dessertspoon chutney, 1 saltspoon salt, juice of 1/2 lemon, and 1/2 pint thin brown sauce or gravy.
Melt Crisco in stewpan, put in onion (sliced), and fry for a few minutes. Then add meat, cut in small pieces, and fry all together for about 10 minutes. Now sprinkle curry over meat, and stir contents of saucepan over fire for another 5 minutes. The gherkins, chutney and salt must now be added; also sauce or gravy; and stewpan must be set over very slow fire about 1 hour; by that time meat should be quite tender. Add lemon juice, and dish up. Serve with plainly boiled rice.
Fried Chicken, Swiss Style Cook chicken in salted water till it is fairly tender. Take up, let get cool, and cut into neat pieces for frying. Sprinkle these pieces with salt, pepper, and onion juice, then moisten them well with melted Crisco. Let them stand 1 or 2 hours to absorb flavoring of dressing, then dip in batter and drop into hot Crisco to cook till brown. This batter make of 1 cup flour, as much milk as is needed to have it stiff, 2 eggs, whites and yolks beaten separately, and 1/2 cup brandy. This batter will be better for standing, after it is mixed, for 1 hour.
Two recipes have run together on this page: an Anglo-Indian beef curry and a Swiss-style fried chicken. Both come from a Crisco promotional cookbook, which explains the shortening in every line.
- The hinge: fry the curry powderThe five minutes of stirring curry powder over heat before any liquid goes in is the step that makes the dish. Raw curry powder in gravy tastes dusty and flat; frying it in the fat blooms the spices. Keep it moving so the powder does not scorch.
- Archaic spoonsA dessertspoon is 2 teaspoons. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon. Half a pint of gravy is 1 cup in US measure, 10 fl oz if the book is working in imperial.
- CriscoAny neutral solid or liquid fat works; 4 tablespoons is a generous amount for 2 pounds of beef, and 2-3 is enough if you would rather not have the curry sit under a slick of fat. Ghee is closer to what the dish would have used in India.
- Cut of beefAn hour on a very slow fire suits chuck, shin or skirt cut into 1/2-inch pieces. Lean steak cut small will be dry and stringy in the same time.
- Thin brown sauceThis means a light espagnole or a pan gravy thinned to pouring consistency. A cup of good beef stock with a teaspoon of flour worked into the frying fat gives the same body.
- "Dry" curryThe name is a promise about the finish. Simmer uncovered or half-covered so the cup of gravy reduces to a thick coating on the meat rather than a soup; the lemon juice goes in off the heat at the very end so it stays sharp.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef serves four to six with rice.
- The fried chicken, and its brandy batterThe chicken is boiled first, but only until 'fairly tender', so the frying finishes the cooking as well as browning it; give it 3-4 minutes a side in fat at about 350-365F and check that it is cooked through. The batter is a cup of flour, two eggs with the whites folded in separately, milk to a stiff drop, and half a cup of brandy, which lightens it and helps it brown. Resting it an hour lets the flour hydrate, and is worth doing.
- Two hours standingOne to two hours standing -- The original has the seasoned chicken sitting out for 1 or 2 hours to absorb the flavouring. Refrigerate it for that interval instead, and let it come back toward room temperature briefly before it hits the fat.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by the makers of Crisco in the mid-1910s, which is why a beef curry and a fried chicken both call for the same hydrogenated shortening; the book's job was to show that one tin could stand in for butter, lard and frying oil alike. The curry itself is squarely Anglo-Indian, the kind of dish that returned to British and American kitchens with colonial households: commercial curry powder, a base of fried onion, and the sweet-sour lift of chutney and chopped gherkins, a very British addition that would puzzle a cook in Madras. Plainly boiled rice was the usual accompaniment in period cookery writing.