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Curry Gravy
Make a powder by mixing together two tablespoonfuls of ground rice with a salt-spoonful of pepper, a salt-spoonful of salt, and a salt-spoonful of mixed sweet herbs dried and powdered. Cut two pounds of veal into pieces about an inch and a half square and half an inch thick. Dip them in hot butter, then in the powder, and fry them in butter till lightly browned on both sides. Melt a little butter over the fire, and fry in it six large onions and two apples sliced. When tender rub them through a sieve, and mix smoothly with the pulp a table-spoonful of curry paste, a table-spoonful of ground rice, a tea-spoonful of curry powder, and as much nicely-flavoured stock as is required. Stir the sauce over the fire, and put the fried meat into it. Simmer gently for forty minutes. Just before serving, squeeze over it the juice of a lemon. When the flavour is liked, a quarter of a clove of garlic may be stewed with the meat. Probable cost, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
Despite the name, this is a full veal curry rather than a sauce to be served alongside something else. The onion-and-apple purée is the body of the dish, so treat it as the main job and everything else follows.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon. So the dredging powder is 2 tablespoons rice flour with 1/4 teaspoon each of pepper, salt and dried mixed herbs.
- Ground riceGround rice is essentially rice flour, though traditionally milled a little coarser; look for it in supermarkets and in South Asian groceries. It coats the veal without the gluey quality wheat flour gives a long-simmered sauce, and it thickens the gravy at the end.
- Curry paste and curry powderBoth are called for, and they were distinct products: the paste a spice-and-oil preparation, sold ready-made (Crosse & Blackwell among others) but also made at home, the powder a dry blend. A jarred mild Madras-style paste and a standard curry powder are the nearest equivalents. The quantities here are timid by current taste; a heaped tablespoon of paste and a rounded teaspoon of powder is closer to the mark.
- The vealUse shoulder or breast, cut as directed. Leg or loin will be dry after forty minutes in liquid. Diced pork shoulder or boned chicken thigh both work if veal is awkward to buy.
- "Dip them in hot butter"This is simply a wash to make the powder stick. Melt a couple of tablespoons, toss the meat through it, then through the powder, then brown in a further knob of butter in batches so the pan stays hot.
- Rubbing through a sieveSix onions and two apples cooked soft go through a food processor or stick blender in seconds. Cook them slowly and covered until genuinely collapsing, 25-30 minutes, before blending; underdone onion tastes raw and sharp through the finished sauce.
- Stock quantityThe recipe leaves this open. Add enough stock to the purée to make a sauce that comes up around the meat, going gradually so it does not go thin.
- SimmeringForty minutes is right for inch-and-a-half veal pieces at a bare simmer. Keep it below a boil and stir now and then, as the rice flour will catch on the bottom of a thin pan.
- Lemon and garlicThe lemon goes in off the heat and matters more than it looks: it lifts the sweetness of the onion and apple. The optional "quarter of a clove of garlic" is a very English hedge; a whole clove or two will not offend.
- YieldAs stated, four to five servings. The 2s. 6d. is the book's estimate of cost at the time of publication and is of no use now beyond being a period price.
Curry entered British domestic cookery through the East India Company and by the later nineteenth century had been thoroughly naturalised: the tell-tale signs here are the apples, the sweet herbs, the veal and above all the reliance on bought curry paste and curry powder rather than whole spices ground at home. Firms such as Crosse & Blackwell sold both by the jar and the tin, and cookery writers of the 1870s onward seem often to have assumed a household would have them in the store cupboard. Calling the dish a "gravy" reflects the way curry was slotted into English menu language, where the word covered almost any thickened meat sauce; Cassell's treats it as a base formula, the implication being that once you can make this sauce you can put fish, fowl or leftover joint into it. The onion-and-apple purée is characteristic of the period's sauce-making, and the result is mild, sweet and thick, closer to what became the standard British restaurant curry than to anything cooked in India.