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Curry, Calcutta
Cut up a young chicken, either cooked or raw, into convenient-sized pieces. If home-made curry-powder is preferred it may be made by pounding together and mixing thoroughly a table-spoonful of coriander-seed, a table-spoonful of poppy-seed, a salt-spoonful of turmeric, half a salt-spoonful of red chilli, half a salt-spoonful of cumin-seed, half a salt-spoonful of ground ginger, and a salt-spoonful of salt. Generally speaking, however, excellent curry paste and powder may be purchased of respectable dealers for as little as the ingredients would cost. Mix this smoothly with a quarter of a pound of butter, and fry two sliced onions in it till lightly browned. Then fry the chicken. Add the milk of a cocoa-nut, and simmer all gently together for a quarter of an hour. Stir in the juice of a small lemon, and serve with rice. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A late-Victorian Anglo-Indian chicken curry, brisk and workable once the small measures and the coconut liquid are pinned down. The one thing to watch is the simmering time if you start with raw chicken.
- Salt-spoon measuresA salt-spoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon. So the powder works out to about 1 tablespoon coriander seed, 1 tablespoon poppy seed, 1/4 tsp turmeric, 1/8 tsp chilli, 1/8 tsp each cumin and ground ginger, and 1/4 tsp salt. Toasting the whole seeds briefly before pounding gives far more flavour than the recipe implies.
- Poppy-seedThis means white poppy seed (khus khus), used across Indian cookery as a thickener rather than for flavour. Grey-blue European baking poppy seed is not the same thing and will make the sauce muddy; ground blanched almonds or cashews do the same job.
- "The milk of a cocoa-nut"Not the thin water inside the shell, which would be far too weak here. It means the pressed liquid from grated coconut flesh steeped in hot water: one 400 ml tin of coconut milk covers it.
- Raw chicken and the timingFifteen minutes of gentle simmering will finish chicken that is already cooked, but not raw bone-in pieces. If starting raw, allow 25-35 minutes and check the thickest part reaches 165F/74C. The stated total of three-quarters of an hour presumably takes in the pounding and frying as well as the simmer, though the book does not say so.
- Fry the spice, not just the butter"Mix this smoothly with a quarter of a pound of butter" glosses over the step that decides the dish. The paste needs to cook in the fat with the onions until it smells nutty and the butter separates out, two or three minutes at least; raw curry powder tastes dusty however long the sauce simmers afterwards.
- Butter quantityFour ounces (115 g) for one chicken is generous by modern taste and will pool on the surface. Half that is enough, and ghee stands the frying heat better than butter, which browns and catches at curry-paste temperatures.
- Lemon at the endThe juice goes in off the heat or at a bare simmer. Boiled hard with coconut milk it can make the sauce look split and dull the freshness that is the whole point of adding it.
- YieldFour to five as written, with plain long-grain or basmati rice. The 3s. 6d. costing is the book's own, from a period when a chicken was the expensive part of the dish and the spices the cheap one.
Cassell's places this among a run of curries labelled by city -- Madras, Bombay, Calcutta -- a habit of Victorian cookery books that suggested regional authority without much of it. What the name signals here is chiefly the coconut milk and the mild, coriander-heavy spicing. The recipe is a good record of how Anglo-Indian cookery reached British kitchens in the late-Victorian period: the compiler gives the grind-your-own formula for form's sake, then advises that commercial curry powder from a respectable dealer is just as good and no dearer, which was true by then, as firms had been selling ready-blended powders in Britain since the late eighteenth century. The white poppy seed remains the one clearly Indian touch in the list.