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CHICKEN, CURRIED (another way)
Take the remains of a cold fowl, cut it into neat joints, and put aside until wanted. Fry a finely-minced apple and an onion, sliced, in some hot butter or lard. When they are lightly browned, press them through a sieve and put the pulp into a saucepan with a pint of good gravy. Thicken this with a dessert-spoonful of curry powder, a dessert-spoonful of curry paste, and a dessert-spoonful of ground rice; boil it gently until it is smooth and thick. Put in the pieces of chicken and let them remain until they are quite hot; squeeze a little lemon-juice over, and just before serving add a table-spoonful of thick cream. Serve the curry with rice (see RICE, BOILED, FOR CURRY) piled round the dish. Time, half an hour. Sufficient for three persons. Probable cost, 10d., exclusive of the cold fowl.
A Victorian way of using up a roast chicken: the curry sauce is built separately and the cooked meat is only warmed through in it. Treat it as a reheating job, not a braise.
- The hingeThe chicken is already cooked. Once it goes into the sauce it needs five minutes at a bare simmer to heat through; longer and the breast meat turns dry and stringy. Get the sauce fully smooth and thickened before the meat goes anywhere near it.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so you want roughly 2 teaspoons each of curry powder, curry paste and ground rice. Period tablespoons were not standardised and were often reckoned larger than the modern one; 15-20 ml of thick cream will do.
- Curry paste"Curry paste" was sold ready-made in this period as a spice concentrate, and a modern jarred Indian curry paste is the nearest substitute. If you use none, increase the powder and add a teaspoon of vinegar or tamarind for the missing acidity.
- Bloom the spiceRaw curry powder stirred straight into liquid tastes dusty. Fry it briefly in the butter with the apple and onion, or in a little extra fat, before the gravy goes in.
- Ground riceGround rice is rice milled to a fine grit, coarser than rice flour and still sold for puddings. Rice flour will thicken a pint of gravy at about the same quantity; cornflour is stronger, so use rather less, and it gives a glossier finish.
- "Good gravy"This means real meat stock, ideally reduced roasting-pan juices, not gravy from granules. A pint (a UK pint, 570 ml) of well-flavoured chicken stock reduced a little is the right substitute; the finished sauce should coat a spoon.
- Sieving the apple and onionPressing fried apple and onion through a sieve is thankless work. A stick blender or small food processor gives the same smooth pulp in seconds.
- Cream and lemon at the endAdd both off the heat. Boiling after the cream goes in risks splitting it, and lemon juice held over heat loses its lift.
- YieldServes three as written, with rice piled round the dish. The recipe gives no weight for the fowl; a pint of sauce suits roughly a pound of picked meat, and that is a reasonable basis for scaling up.
Curry reached British domestic cookery in the wake of trade and service in India, and by the mid-nineteenth century it was often a way of using leftovers: this version begins frankly with "the remains of a cold fowl". The apple is the tell. Sweetened, sieved fruit in the sauce belongs to the Anglo-Indian rather than the Indian tradition, and something of it survives in the mild, faintly sweet curry sauce still served in British pubs and chip shops. So does the reliance on shop-bought curry powder and curry paste, commercial products already established by this date, which let a cook produce something recognisably "curried" without a spice grinder. The costing of tenpence is given separately from the chicken, which had presumably been paid for at an earlier meal.