Home › The Principles of Cookery › Curry Pimento
Curry Pimento
Cut a fowl into joints. Mix a table-spoonful of curry powder with half a tea-spoonful of cayenne, and a pinch of salt. Rub this well into the pieces of fowl, and stew them gently in a breakfast-cupful of good nicely-flavoured stock. Let them simmer gently for half an hour, and before serving squeeze in the juice of a small lemon. Serve on a hot dish with half a pound of rice boiled, and piled round. Time, altogether, three-quarters of an hour. Sufficient for three or four persons. Probable cost, 3s.
A quick Anglo-Indian stew that depends on very little liquid and a hard hit of spice. Two things need translating: the cup and the bird.
- A breakfast-cupfulRoughly 10 fl oz, about 1¼ cups — a half-pint teacup, larger than a modern coffee cup. That is barely enough to cover the joints, which is intended: the sauce should reduce to a thick coating, not a soup, so use a lidded pan just big enough to hold the pieces in one layer and turn them once or twice.
- "A fowl""A fowl" here probably means an older, tougher and fuller-flavoured bird rather than a modern chicken — though the stated three-quarters of an hour is short for such a bird. A supermarket chicken of 3–3½ lb, jointed, is the substitute; thighs and drumsticks hold up far better than breast, which will be dry well before thirty minutes are up.
- The cayenneHalf a teaspoon of cayenne on top of a tablespoon of curry powder is a genuinely hot dish by British standards of the period and by most modern ones. Scale it to your powder — a commercial mild curry powder plus a quarter teaspoon of cayenne gives a closer match to what most cooks now expect.
- Rub, then consider browningThe recipe rubs the dry spice straight onto the meat and goes into the stock, so the spice never meets hot fat. If you want the deeper flavour a modern cook expects, brown the rubbed joints in a little butter or oil first, then add the stock. It is a departure from the text but not from the period.
- Stock mattersWith no onion, no tomato and no thickening, the sauce is essentially seasoned stock. "Good nicely-flavoured" is doing real work here; a weak cube will show. Chicken stock with body to it, or a light veal stock, is what the instruction means.
- The lemon goes in lastSqueezing it in off the heat, just before serving, keeps the sharpness bright. Added early and simmered, the acid flattens out and the spice loses its edge.
- The riceHalf a pound is about 1¼ cups of raw long-grain rice, generous for three or four. Victorian cookery books commonly direct boiling rice in plenty of salted water, draining it, and drying it briefly so the grains stay separate for piling round the dish.
- Where is the pimento?Nothing in the method calls for it. In nineteenth-century British usage "pimento" means allspice, not the sweet red pepper, so the title probably points to a curry powder containing allspice, or to a lost line of the original — a reasonable inference rather than a documented one. A few crushed allspice berries in the stock are in keeping.
Curries fill many pages of Cassell's, and they are English dishes about India rather than Indian dishes: a bought curry powder, a fowl, stock, lemon, and a wall of boiled rice. By the 1870s and 1880s curry powder was a standard grocery item in Britain, sold ready-blended by firms trading on Anglo-Indian associations, and household dictionaries treated it as one seasoning among many rather than as the foundation of a distinct cuisine no no garlic, no ginger and no ghee. The name is a small period puzzle in itself: "pimento" in British kitchen language of the time meant allspice, the dried berry of Pimenta dioica, which had been shipped from Jamaica since the seventeenth century. The costing of 3s. is a reminder of what these books were for; a reader could check whether a dish was within her week's housekeeping money before she committed to it.