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Curry, Madras
Slice one large or two small onions, and fry them in three ounces of butter till they are lightly browned. Mix a dessert-spoonful of curry powder, a dessert-spoonful of curry paste, and a tea-spoonful of ground rice smoothly with the butter, and add a salt-spoonful of salt, and a breakfast-cupful of good gravy. Cut about one pound of meat, either fowl, rabbit, veal, or beef, into convenient-sized pieces, about one inch and a half square. Put these in with the gravy, and simmer gently for forty minutes. Remember to stir it every few minutes. A little rasped cocoa-nut, or the strained juice of a lemon, or an acid apple, is an improvement to the curry, which should be served with a border of rice round the dish. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. Sufficient for four persons.
A late-Victorian English curry: onions browned in butter, commercial curry powder and paste, and stock thickened with a little ground rice. The measures are the main obstacle.
- Spoon and cup measuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons, so the powder and paste are about 2 tsp each. A salt-spoonful is roughly a quarter teaspoon. A breakfast-cupful is generous, around 8-10 fl oz.
- "Good gravy"Not gravy in the modern poured-over-roast sense but a well-reduced brown stock or the strained juices of a previous roast. A strong beef or chicken stock stands in; if it is unsalted, expect to add more than the quarter teaspoon given.
- Curry pasteCurry paste was commonly sold bottled in Britain alongside curry powder rather than instead of it, though cookery books also gave recipes for making it at home; the commercial kind was typically oily and vinegar-sharp. A tablespoon of a jarred madras paste plus the powder gets close; a fresh South Asian masala paste will taste quite different, which is not a fault but is not this dish.
- Ground riceFinely milled rice, coarser than modern rice flour but usable in its place, here doing the thickening instead of a flour roux. Two teaspoons is a light thickening; it will not turn the sauce into a gravy, only give it body. Stir it into the butter with the spices so it does not lump.
- The forty minutes only suits some of the meatsFowl, rabbit and veal in inch-and-a-half pieces are done in that time. Beef is not, unless it is a tender cut cooked rare, and stewing beef at forty minutes will be tough and dry. Chuck or shin wants an hour and a half to two hours at a bare simmer, with more stock to cover the loss.
- Stirring and scorchingThe instruction to stir every few minutes is doing real work here: butter, spice and rice flour catch on the base of the pan very readily, and burnt curry powder turns the whole dish bitter. Keep the heat low enough that the surface barely moves.
- The souring agentChoose one, not all three. Lemon juice goes in at the end off the heat; a grated tart apple goes in with the onions so it collapses into the sauce; grated coconut, fresh or unsweetened desiccated, is best added in the last ten minutes.
- Yield and servingFour modest portions as the book says, though a pound of meat between four assumes a fuller table than most now set. The "border of rice" means plain boiled rice pressed round the edge of a hot dish with the curry spooned into the well.
In late Victorian England curry was thoroughly domesticated in English cookery, and this recipe shows exactly how: butter rather than ghee, a bottled powder and a bottled paste rather than spices ground at home, and stock and rice flour standing in for any Indian technique. Cassell's gives several curries and distinguishes them mostly by additions and by which proprietary seasoning is used. Commercial curry powders had been sold in Britain since the late eighteenth century and were a staple grocery item; curry paste, an oilier, vinegared preparation, sat beside them on the shelf. The costing in shillings and pence and the note that the dish suits fowl, rabbit, veal or beef equally mark it as a middle-class weekday recipe, built around a cheap joint simmered until tender, and a reminder that curry in Victorian England was as much a way of using up meat as a cuisine in its own right.