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Curry of Vegetables
A palatable dish may be made by currying green vegetables such as cabbages, cauliflowers, green peas, beans, vegetable-marrow, spinach, or sorrel. They may be cooked separately, or one or two kinds together. Cut them into small shreds. Fry them in hot butter, which has been mixed with a liberal allowance of curry powder, and a little salt, and when lightly browned cover them with cream, new milk, or good gravy. A sliced onion may be added, or not, according to taste. Let them simmer till sufficiently cooked. Just before serving, squeeze the juice of a lemon over them, and send rice to table with them. The time which this dish will require will vary with the nature of the vegetables. Probable cost, about 1s. 6d. for a moderate-sized dish.
A loose formula rather than a fixed recipe: the book gives no quantities and expects the cook to judge by eye. A few decisions are worth making before you start.
- Fry the powder, do not just stir it inThe recipe mixes the curry powder into the hot butter and fries the vegetables in it until lightly browned, so the spices cook before any liquid goes in. Giving the powder a short time in the butter drives off the raw, dusty taste; watch it, as scorched curry powder turns bitter.
- A working quantityThe book gives none; as a starting point, for about 1.5 lb of prepared vegetables try 2 oz butter, 1 to 2 tablespoons curry powder, half a teaspoon salt and roughly half a pint of cream, milk or gravy. "A liberal allowance" suggests a freer hand with the spice than a modern recipe would specify.
- Vegetable marrowA large summer squash, picked mature. Courgettes or zucchini stand in directly; peel and seed if the marrow is big, as the centre is watery.
- New milkMilk fresh from the cow, unskimmed and unhomogenised. Whole milk is the nearest thing, though cream gives the sauce the body the recipe assumes.
- Stagger the cookingThe book admits the timing varies and leaves it there. Beans, cauliflower and marrow want eight to twelve minutes of simmering; peas, spinach and sorrel need two or three. Add the tender things at the end rather than shredding everything into the pan at once.
- Lemon and dairyAcid added to simmering milk can split it, and cream is safer but not proof against it. Take the pan off the heat, let it stop bubbling, then squeeze the lemon in and serve at once. Using gravy instead of dairy sidesteps the problem entirely.
- SorrelSorrel collapses to a khaki puree in a minute or two and is sharply acidic in its own right. Treat it as a seasoning folded in at the end, and cut the lemon back if you use much of it.
- Yield and costThe book says only "a moderate-sized dish" and gives no quantities, so the yield is whatever you scale it to. The 1s. 6d. is a Victorian price for a family-table dish and has no modern equivalent worth calculating.
Curry powder was a British commercial invention, a ready-blended approximation of Indian spice mixtures advertised from the 1780s onward, and by the nineteenth century it was a fixture of the English store cupboard rather than an exotic import. Dishes like this one show what happened to it: the seasoning was detached from any particular Indian dish and applied to whatever the kitchen garden produced, so cabbage, marrow and sorrel end up under the same heading. The instruction to "send rice to table with them" is the one surviving structural echo of the original cuisine.