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CURRY POWDER (Dr. Kitchener's recipe)
Put six ounces of coriander-seed, five ounces of turmeric, two ounces each of black pepper and mustard-seed, half an ounce of cumin-seed, half an ounce of cinnamon, and one ounce of lesser cardamoms, into a cool oven for a night. Pound them thoroughly in a marble mortar, and rub them through a sieve. Keep the powder in a well-corked bottle. Probable cost, 3s. Sufficient, one table-spoonful of curry powder to a pound of meat, and a cupful of gravy.
A large-batch spice blend from the Regency physician-cook William Kitchiner, reproduced by Cassell decades after his death. Everything here is still available; the main adjustments are scale, the oven, and the grinder.
- Scale it downThe weights total seventeen ounces, just over a pound of spice, which will yield several cups of powder. Quarter or eighth the quantities unless you are supplying a household; ground spice fades within a few months.
- "A cool oven for a night"This means drying, not roasting: the residual warmth of a coal range after the fire had died, perhaps 150-200F. A modern oven on its lowest setting for an hour or two, or a warm airing cupboard, does the same job. The point is to drive off moisture so the seeds shatter rather than smear in the mortar.
- Lesser cardamomsGreen cardamom, Elettaria cardamomum, as opposed to the larger black or Nepalese kind. If you buy whole pods rather than seed, allow somewhat more than the stated ounce by weight, since the husks are discarded.
- Mustard-seedThe recipe does not specify a variety; either brown or white (yellow) seed is possible. Mustard's pungency develops only when the ground seed meets moisture, so the blend is sharper in the pan than it seems dry.
- GrindingA spice grinder or a coffee mill kept for the purpose replaces the marble mortar. Turmeric is woody and will resist; grind it separately, or buy it already ground and add it after the rest has been sieved. Sieving is not optional if you want a powder that dissolves into gravy rather than gritting it.
- No chilliThere is no cayenne or chilli in this formula at all, and the pepper is the only heat, though other English curry powders of the period did include cayenne. A dish made with this will need chilli added separately if you expect the modern profile.
- Cooking it outRaw curry powder tastes dusty. Fry the tablespoon in fat with the onions for a minute before the liquid goes in.
- Storage and yieldA well-corked bottle meant a dark cupboard; use an airtight jar away from light and heat. At the stated rate of one tablespoon per pound of meat, a pound of powder seasons somewhere in the region of fifty to seventy pounds of curry.
- Probable costThree shillings was a real outlay for a store-cupboard item in the period, which suits a recipe pitched at more than a pound at a time.
William Kitchiner (c. 1775-1827), the London physician whose Apicius Redivivus, or The Cook's Oracle ran through many editions, published curry powder as a domestic formula at a time when it was also sold ready-made by druggists and India merchants; he was not the first English writer to do so -- printed curry powder recipes appear in English domestic cookery books before his. His blend circulated widely enough that compilers such as Cassell were still crediting it by name in the 1870s. The mixture reflects the Anglo-Indian taste of its moment: coriander and turmeric dominate by weight, cardamom and cinnamon supply perfume, and the heat here is left to black pepper. That a single premixed powder should stand in for the many distinct spice combinations of the subcontinent is a fact about British cooking rather than about Indian cooking.