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Beans, Broad or Windsor, Curried
Shell enough broad beans to make a pint, and boil them in plenty of slightly-salted water until tender. Drain, and remove the skins whilst hot. Plunge four ripe tomatoes into boiling water for a moment, skin them, cut them into slices, and put them into a frying-pan with a little butter and the beans. Season with salt and pepper, and moisten with a small quantity of curry sauce. Dress these neatly on a dish bordered with plainly boiled rice, pile the beans in the centre, sprinkle with finely chopped parsley and paprika pepper. Put into a hot oven for a few minutes, and serve. THE SAUCE.--Peel and slice an onion, scrape and slice a carrot, fry both in half an ounce of butter till the onion is a light brown, then add a table-spoonful of Empress curry powder, and stir for a few seconds. Then add a small sour apple peeled and chopped, moisten with half a gill of tomato puree and one gill espagnole sauce (see ESPAGNOLE SAUCE), and boil for a few minutes. Season to taste, and, lastly, stir in a finely-chopped French gherkin. Probable cost, 1s. 8d.
A straightforward vegetable curry built on a separately made sauce; the only real work is podding and skinning the beans. Read the sauce paragraph first, since it takes longer than the beans.
- Skin the beans while hotThis is the hinge of the dish. The grey outer skin slips off easily the moment the beans come out of the water and turns leathery as they cool, so drain and pinch them straight away, or work in two batches.
- How many beans to buyA pint of shelled broad beans is roughly 10-12 oz, which means about 3 lb of beans in the pod. Frozen shelled broad beans work and need only a few minutes' boiling.
- Cooking time"Until tender" is short for young beans -- 3 to 5 minutes. Large, starchy end-of-season beans may want 8 to 10. Overboiled broad beans collapse into paste once skinned.
- GillsA gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, that is 5 fl oz; half a gill is therefore about 2.5 fl oz, or roughly a third of a cup. So the sauce is about 1/3 cup tomato puree to about 2/3 cup espagnole.
- Empress curry powderA proprietary Victorian blend, long gone. Any decent madras-style curry powder does the job; a tablespoon in this quantity of sauce is assertive, so start with two teaspoons if your powder is fresh.
- Espagnole sauceA brown sauce of roux, brown stock and mirepoix, reduced. Cassell's assumes you have some standing by. A well-reduced beef or veal stock thickened lightly, or a good bought demi-glace, gives the same body; note that it makes the dish non-vegetarian.
- Tomato pureeHere it means sieved fresh tomato pulp, not modern concentrated tomato paste. Use passata, or thin tomato paste with water to a pouring consistency.
- Hot ovenThe book gives no temperatures; "hot oven" is conventionally read as somewhere around 425F. The dish only goes in to heat through and set the surface, so three or four minutes is enough -- longer and the rice border dries out.
- French gherkinA cornichon, chopped fine and stirred in at the very last, as the recipe directs, so it keeps its sharpness. It is doing the work a squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chutney would do in a modern curry.
- YieldServes four as a side or two as a light main course with the rice.
Broad beans are among the oldest cultivated legumes in Europe, grown in Britain long before the runner and French beans arrived from the Americas; the "Windsor" of the title is a broad-podded English variety type widely listed in nineteenth-century seed catalogues. What is more revealing here is the treatment. Curry powder was by this date a fixture of the English store cupboard, sold under brand names and applied to whatever the garden produced, so a homely bean gets a brown-sauce curry, a rice border and a dusting of paprika. The costing of 1s 8d, given at the end of many entries in the book, let a household cook weigh the dish against the week's budget.