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Curry Balls
Boil half a pound of rice with one pint of water, a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder, half a tea-spoonful each of salt and sugar, and one small onion chopped very fine. Chop up eight ounces of any cold meat with a tea-spoonful of minced parsley and a little mixed herbs. While the rice is hot mix the meat and a beaten egg with it, and form the mixture into balls; put them on a baking-tin, well buttered, in a hot oven to brown. Or they may be egged and bread-crumbed, and fried in boiling fat. Probable cost, 1s
A leftovers dish built on the absorption method of cooking rice, with the seasoning going into the water rather than the meat. It works, but the quantities need reading carefully.
- The rice is the hingeHalf a pound of rice to one pint of water is an absorption ratio, not a boiling one — about 1 cup rice to 2 cups liquid. Cover it, cook gently until the water is gone, and leave it slightly sticky; dry, separate grains will not bind into balls.
- Dessert-spoonA dessert-spoon is two teaspoons, so roughly 2 tsp of curry powder for the whole half-pound of rice. Victorian curry powders were generally milder and more turmeric-and-coriander led than many modern blends; taste and adjust upward if yours is gentle.
- "A hot oven"The book gives no temperatures; 'a hot oven' is usually taken as somewhere around 400–450F (200–230C). The balls are already made from cooked ingredients — the oven is only there to brown and set the outside, so 15–20 minutes should be enough.
- WeightsHalf a pound of rice is about 1 heaped cup dry (225 g); eight ounces of meat is 225 g. The finished mixture weighs a good deal more than either, since the rice roughly triples in the pan.
- "Any cold meat"This means yesterday's roast — lamb, beef, chicken, ham. It must be already cooked and properly chilled. Chop it fine by hand rather than blitzing it, or the texture turns to paste.
- Mix while hotThe instruction looks deliberate: warm rice and a beaten egg mixed together cling as the mixture cools, which helps hold the balls together when shaping; egg stirred into cold rice binds less readily.
- Frying option"Boiling fat" means fat at frying heat, around 350–375F (175–190C). Chill the crumbed balls for half an hour first so they hold together when they go in.
- YieldEnough for supper for four with a salad, or a substantial first course for six; the cooked mixture is bulky, so the number of balls depends entirely on how large you roll them.
Cassell's placed this among the economy dishes that any late-Victorian household dictionary carried in quantity: a way of turning Sunday's joint into Tuesday's supper without it looking like the same meat twice. Curry powder was by then a thoroughly domesticated British product, sold ready-blended by grocers and used less to make Indian food than to season leftovers, soups and made-up dishes of every kind — the standard nineteenth-century solution to cold mutton. The "probable cost, 1s" note is characteristic of the book, which priced nearly every entry so a mistress could reckon the week's expenditure; a shilling was real money for a supper dish, and the figure assumes the meat is already paid for.