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Beef Kabobs
Take one pound of rump steak, cut it into thin pieces about two inches wide and six inches long, rub each piece with the juice of green ginger, and lay over each a mixture prepared as follows. Chop an onion and two heads of garlic very small, and pound twenty-four cloves in a mortar. Mix these well together with a table-spoonful of Empress curry powder, and add salt to taste. Lay some of this mixture on each piece of the meat, roll up, and fix on skewers, then fry in butter for about ten minutes. Take out the skewers, as the meat will retain its shape, and serve with a gravy or thin brown sauce, to which a few drops of lemon juice should be added. Rice may also be served with this. Probable cost, 1s. 8d.
An Anglo-Indian beef roll rather than a skewered kebab in the modern sense — the skewers only hold the shape while the rolls set in the pan. Two of the quantities need a second look before you shop.
- Cloves: read this before you poundTwenty-four whole cloves in a spice paste for one pound of beef is overwhelming by current palates; clove is dominant and slightly numbing in quantity. Four to six will give the warm note the dish is after.
- "Two heads of garlic"A "head" normally means the whole bulb, and two bulbs against one pound of steak is a very large amount. Start with a small quantity and adjust upward to taste.
- Green gingerFresh root ginger, not preserved or stem ginger. Grate it and squeeze the pulp in your hand or a piece of muslin to get the juice; a thumb-sized piece yields roughly a teaspoon.
- Empress curry powderA proprietary Victorian blend, long gone. Any decent mild Madras-style curry powder stands in; a tablespoon for a pound of meat is about right.
- Cutting the steakThe recipe asks for thin pieces about two inches by six. Bat them out between sheets of film so they roll without splitting and cook through in the stated time.
- The ten minutesTen minutes in butter over moderate heat is enough for thin rolls, but butter alone will brown and burn at the heat needed for colour. Add a spoonful of oil, or clarify the butter first, and turn the rolls to colour all sides.
- The sauce"Thin brown sauce" here is a light meat gravy, not the bottled condiment. Deglaze the pan with stock, reduce a little, and finish with the lemon juice off the heat.
- YieldOne pound of steak makes enough rolls for two generous portions with rice, or four as part of a larger meal; the number of rolls depends on how thin the slices are cut and flattened.
The word is ultimately Arabic, reaching English via Persian and Urdu kabāb, meaning grilled or fried meat, and reached British kitchens through officers, civil servants and their cooks returning from India; nineteenth-century English cookbooks spell it kabob, cabob and kebob more or less interchangeably. What Cassell's gives here is not the skewered grill most readers now picture but a stuffed and rolled fry. The tell-tale detail is "Empress curry powder": several firms sold branded curry mixtures to British households, and a recipe naming one is really quoting an advertisement as much as an ingredient. The costing in shillings and pence — 1s. 8d. for the dish — was a standard feature of Cassell's, aimed at the middle-class housekeeper working to a weekly budget.