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CHICKEN, FRIED (another way)
Take the remains of a cold chicken, cut it into neat pieces, brush a little oil over each piece, and strew over it, rather thickly, salt and curry powder. Melt a little butter in a frying-pan, and fry some onions, cut into thin strips about half an inch long and the eighth of an inch wide. Fry them slowly, keeping them in the pan until they are a dark brown colour, and quite dry. They will require a little care, as they must on no account be burnt. Fry the chicken, strew the onion over it, and serve with slices of lemon. Time to fry the chicken, ten minutes. Allow two or three pieces of chicken for each person. Probable cost, 3d., exclusive of the cold chicken.
A use for leftover roast chicken, closer to a curried sauté than what a modern cook means by fried chicken — no batter, no crumb, no deep fat. The dish stands or falls on the onions.
- The onions are the dishThey want a good 20-30 minutes over low heat, stirred often, until deep brown, dry and crisp — a home version of the fried onion garnish known in South Asian cookery as birista. Push the heat and they scorch, which turns the whole plate bitter. Drain them on paper and salt them off the heat.
- Cold cooked chicken onlyThe meat is already cooked, so the ten minutes in the pan is for browning and warming through. Pull it off as soon as the edges colour; a further ten minutes will dry leftover breast to string. Thigh and leg meat holds up far better here.
- Curry powder needs heatRaw curry powder strewn on the surface tastes dusty. Let the pieces sit oiled and seasoned for 15-20 minutes, and make sure the spiced faces actually meet the hot pan so the powder toasts.
- Butter alone will burnAt the temperature needed to brown chicken, butter blackens. Use half butter and half a neutral oil, or clarified butter, especially since the pan has already had the onions through it.
- "A little oil"The recipe does not say which oil; olive or a plain salad oil is the likely intention. Either way it is used sparingly as a dressing rather than a frying medium — a teaspoon or two for a whole bird's worth of pieces is enough to make the spice stick.
- Cost note3d. is threepence in pre-decimal currency, the cost of the butter, onions and spice only. The book prices leftovers at nothing, which is the entire point of the recipe.
- YieldThe stated two or three pieces per person means a carved carcass feeds three or four as a light dish. Rice, or bread and a salad, turns it into supper; the lemon is not optional, as it is the only acid present.
Curried cold meat was a fixture of the late-Victorian household, and this entry belongs to the large body of British-Indian cookery that came home with returning Anglo-Indian families and settled into the reheating chapters of English cookbooks. Commercial curry powder or a a whole tradition of individually ground spices — was widely sold in Britain by the middle of the nineteenth century, which is why a book like Cassell's can call for it as casually as for pepper. The browned onion garnish is the more interesting detail: frying onions slowly to a dark crisp is a genuinely Indian technique, usually met now under the name birista, though slowly browned onions were also long-standing English practice. Recipes of this kind were also thrift writing. Cookbooks of the period carried chapters on re-dressing cold meat, and spice, onion and lemon were the standard means of making the second appearance taste deliberate rather than apologetic.