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Curry Sauce
Peel and slice one small onion, scrape and slice a small carrot, and fry both in half an ounce of butter till the onion is a light brown colour; add a table-spoonful of curry powder, and stir for a few seconds. Next add a small sour apple, peeled, cored, and chopped; moisten with half a gill of tomato puree, and one gill of Espagnole sauce, and boil for a few minutes. Season to taste, and stir in last of all a finely-chopped French gherkin. Strain, and bottle. Probable cost, 1s.
A Victorian brown curry sauce: French technique with a spoonful of curry powder folded in, meant to be strained smooth and kept in a bottle. Two things decide whether it works — the Espagnole underneath it, and not scorching the powder.
- Gills and the tablespoonIn this British book a gill is a quarter of a pint, 5 fl oz, so half a gill is about 2 1/2 fl oz of tomato puree and a gill is a scant 2/3 US cup of Espagnole.
- EspagnoleThe basic brown sauce of the period: brown roux, veal or beef stock, mirepoix, long reduction. Good bought demi-glace, diluted to sauce consistency, is the closest shortcut; a thin stock thickened with cornflour will taste hollow here because the sauce has no other body.
- Bloom the curry powder, do not burn it"Stir for a few seconds" is the hinge. The powder needs contact with hot butter to lose its raw, dusty edge, but turmeric and ground coriander scorch in well under a minute and the bitterness cannot be cooked out afterwards. Add the apple as soon as it smells fragrant.
- Tomato pureeVictorian tomato puree was a thin sieved tomato pulp, not the triple-concentrated tube paste sold now. Use passata, or thin about a tablespoon of tube paste with water to make 2 1/2 fl oz.
- The sour appleA cooking apple that collapses — Bramley, or Granny Smith at a pinch. It is there for acid and pectin body, not sweetness, so avoid Gala or Fuji.
- French gherkinA cornichon, pickled in vinegar rather than dill brine. The recipe has it stirred in 'last of all', after the boiling. Since the sauce is strained, its job is to perfume the liquid; chop it fine and give it a minute or two before straining.
- "Strain, and bottle"This is a stock-based sauce with no vinegar or salt load to preserve it. Treat it as a fresh sauce: cool quickly, refrigerate in a clean jar, use within three or four days, or freeze in small portions. It is not a shelf-stable bottling recipe despite the wording.
- Yield and useA cup or rather less after straining — enough for perhaps four servings poured over cold cooked chicken, rabbit, hard-boiled eggs or reheated meat. It thickens on chilling and will need loosening with a little stock when warmed.
- Probable costOne shilling, the book's habitual note of household economy — twelve pence in pre-decimal money.
Curry powder had been sold ready-mixed in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and by the time Cassell's dictionaries were compiled in the later nineteenth it was a standard store-cupboard seasoning rather than an exotic one. What this sauce shows is the Anglo-Indian compromise of the period: the structure is straight out of the French repertoire, an Espagnole enriched and pointed up, with the curry powder treated as one flavouring among several and the whole thing strained to the smoothness a Victorian kitchen expected of a sauce. The apple is a recognisably British touch, a sweet-sour bracketing that recurs in nineteenth-century curry recipes and has little counterpart in the Indian cooking that inspired them.