Home › The Principles of Cookery › Curry, Malay
Curry, Malay
Take two ounces of blanched almonds. Fry them in three ounces of butter till they are lightly browned, but do not let them burn. Drain, and pound them to a smooth paste with the rind of a small lemon and a sliced onion. Cut a young chicken into convenient-sized pieces, and fry them in the butter. Drain them. Mix a table-spoonful of curry powder, and a heaped salt-spoonful of salt, very smoothly with the butter. Add gradually a cupful of gravy, put in the chicken and paste, and simmer for half an hour, then add a cupful of cream. Let the curry nearly boil, and just before serving squeeze the juice of a small lemon into it. Time, altogether, one hour. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A mild, almond-thickened chicken curry of the Anglo-Victorian kind, closer to a korma than to anything fiery. The whole dish hangs on keeping the cream from splitting once the lemon goes in.
- The hinge: cream, then lemon, off the boilThe recipe says "let the curry nearly boil" for a reason. Once the cream is in, hold it below a simmer, and add the lemon juice with the pan off the heat, stirring it through just before it goes to the table. Acid into hot cream that is actually boiling will curdle it.
- SaltspoonfulA saltspoon is a quarter of a teaspoon, so a heaped one is roughly a scant half teaspoon. Season again at the end, after the gravy has reduced.
- CupfulProbably in the region of 8 fl oz / 240 ml, though Victorian cup measures were not standardised and a breakfast cup could be larger. Two cupfuls of liquid total for one small chicken gives a sauce that coats rather than floods; if it looks thin after the half hour, let it reduce before the cream goes in.
- "Gravy"Not thickened brown gravy in the modern sense but the strained cooking liquor of meat or bones. Good chicken stock is the direct substitute.
- A young chickenA small spring chicken in the original; a 2 1/2 to 3 lb bird jointed into eight pieces works. Half an hour of gentle simmering is right for pieces that size, and thigh meat should read at least 165F when done.
- The lemon rindPare or zest only the yellow, no white pith, or the pounded paste turns bitter. A microplane and a small food processor do in a minute what a mortar was meant for.
- Frying the almondsBlanched almonds in butter go from pale gold to burnt very fast. Keep the heat moderate, move them constantly, and pull them out while they are lighter than you think they should be.
- Curry powderVictorian commercial curry powders were generally mild and turmeric-forward, and some were salted. Any mild modern blend is in keeping; cook it in the butter for a minute before the liquid to take the raw edge off the spices.
- YieldFour to five as the book says, with rice. The 4s. cost is late-Victorian money and of interest only as a marker that this was not an economical dish.
Curry powder in a bottle was one of the great domestic conveniences of the Victorian kitchen, and the cookery dictionaries of the period carried whole runs of curries distinguished less by technique than by label.