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Chicken, Curried
This may be made either from uncooked chicken, or with the remains of a cold one. When a fresh chicken is used, cut the bird into neat joints and fry them lightly in hot butter or lard till they are brown. Put with them a Spanish onion, sliced, and a few mushrooms, covering all with some good stock. Let this sauce simmer gently for twenty minutes or more. Mix two dessert-spoonfuls of curry paste and a spoonful of ground rice very smoothly with a little water, and add this to the sauce. A little apple pulp or rasped cocoa-nut may be added if the flavour is liked. Just before serving, stir in a cupful of hot cream, and a squeeze of lemon-juice. Serve the curry in a hot dish, with rice (see RICE, BOILED, FOR CURRY) piled round it. One chicken (probable cost, 2s. 6d.) sufficient for three persons.
A late-Victorian British curry: browned joints, stock, a commercial curry paste and cream at the end. It works, but the timings assume a small, tough fowl and the seasoning is left almost entirely to the paste.
- The hinge: thicken before the creamThe ground ricecurry paste slurry needs to simmer 8-10 minutes after it goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and pasty. Only then does the cream go in, off the boil, so it does not split or curdle against the lemon juice.
- Cooking time is short for a modern birdThe recipe allows twenty minutes "or more" of simmering after the joints are browned, which will not reliably cook supermarket joints through on the bone. Simmer 35-45 minutes for legs and thighs, until the juices run clear and a thermometer in the thickest part reads 165F. Breast pieces can go in for the last 15 minutes.
- Dessert-spoonfulAbout two teaspoons, so "two dessert-spoonfuls" of curry paste is roughly 4 teaspoons. That is mild by current taste; you may well want 2-3 tablespoons of a jarred paste, added and tasted in stages.
- Curry paste, then and nowCommercial Victorian pastes typically drew on turmeric, coriander, cumin, fenugreek and chilli worked up in oil, though blends differed from maker to maker; the effect was nearer a mild curry powder than a Thai or Goan paste. A modern jarred paste is far more assertive and often already salted, so hold back salt until the end.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice, a little coarser than the rice flour sold in supermarkets and Asian grocers but interchangeable here. Read "a spoonful" as a dessertspoon or so; it thickens gently without the flouriness of a roux, and cornflour is the nearest substitute.
- Spanish onionA large, mild onion, typically 8 oz or more. Slice thinly and let it soften properly in the fat after the chicken browns, five to eight minutes, rather than dropping it in raw with the stock as written.
- Rasped cocoa-nutFresh coconut grated on a rasp. Unsweetened desiccated coconut works, about 2 tablespoons; do not use sweetened flake. The apple pulp is simply stewed cooking apple, and both appear often in British curry recipes of the period to soften the spicing.
- Using cold cooked chickenSkip the frying, build the sauce with the onion and mushrooms, and add the picked meat only for the last five minutes to heat through. Any longer and it shreds.
- YieldThree servings as written, which is generous by modern standards; with rice a chicken will stretch to four.
Curry entered British cookery by several routes over the eighteenth century -- printed English curry recipes appear by 1747 -- and by the time the dictionary from which this recipe appears to come was published it had been thoroughly domesticated: the spicing comes out of a jar, the sharpness from lemon, the sweetness from apple or coconut, and the whole thing is finished with cream in the manner of a fricassee. Commercial curry powders and pastes were advertised in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, which is why a recipe like this gives no individual spices at all. The rice is boiled separately and "piled round" the dish rather than served under it, a presentation often found in Victorian curry recipes. It also belongs to the large class of Victorian recipes designed to use up "the remains of a cold one" -- a roast fowl reappearing on a later day in a sauce strong enough to disguise its age.