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COD, CURRIED (another way)
Take the remains of cold cod, remove the skin and bones, break it into flakes, and fry it a golden brown in some hot dripping or lard. Drain it, and fry some sliced onions in the same fat, put them with the fish, and stir into the fat some rice flour. Mix it quite smoothly, and add by degrees sufficient stock to make the sauce of the consistency of cream; add a tea-spoonful of curry powder, half a tea-spoonful of salt, and two or three grains of cayenne. Put the cod and onions with the curry, and let them simmer for a few minutes. Place the fish on a hot dish; add half a cupful of cream to the gravy, let it nearly boil, then pour it over the fish, and serve either with or without a wall of rice. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold fish and the cream. Sufficient, one pound of cold fish with sauce, for three persons.
A Victorian leftovers dish: cooked cod reheated in a thin curry sauce. The whole thing hangs on treating the fish gently once it is back in the pan.
- Don't overwork the fishFlaked cooked cod falls apart the moment it is stirred. Fry it in a single layer, turn it as little as possible, and fold it into the sauce at the end rather than simmering it more than two or three minutes.
- Dripping and lardBeef dripping gives the flavour the book assumes; lard is neutral. Either works, as does clarified butter or a mild oil, but you need enough to fry in — about 3 tablespoons for a pound of fish.
- Rice flourStill sold, usually in Asian and gluten-free aisles. It thickens more loosely than wheat flour and does not need long cooking to lose a raw taste; about 1 tablespoon per cup of stock gives the "consistency of cream" asked for.
- Curry powder quantityA teaspoon for a pound of fish is very mild by current taste. Commercial Victorian blends varied a good deal in strength, so taste and increase if the sauce reads as flat.
- Bloom the spiceAdd the curry powder to the fat with the flour rather than to the finished liquid. A minute in hot fat takes the raw dustiness off the turmeric and coriander.
- "Two or three grains of cayenne"A loose old measure meaning the smallest possible pinch — a few specks from the tip of a knife, not a measured amount.
- The cream at the end"Let it nearly boil" is worth following: cream can split at a rolling boil. Heat it through and take it off.
- Yield and servingThree portions from a pound of cooked fish, as stated. A "wall of rice" is piped or spooned around the rim of the dish with the curry in the centre; a bowl of plain rice alongside does the same job.
- The fish itselfThis only works with cod that was well cooked and properly chilled. Reheat it thoroughly — bring the sauced fish to a full simmer briefly rather than merely warming it.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of the British middle-class kitchen by the time Cassell's was compiled, and fish curry in particular did the work that a fish pie or fishcake does now: it accounted for the cold remains of a large boiled cod, a cheap and very common fish. The style of curry here — a flour-thickened stock sauce, a spoonful of ready-made powder, cream to finish — is the Anglo-Indian house style that developed in Britain through the nineteenth century, using commercial blends rather than spices ground to order. The costing in pence, and the careful note that the price excludes the fish and cream, is characteristic of the book's audience: cooks working to a weekly budget for whom nothing cooked was allowed to go to waste.