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Curry
This esteemed dish, especially a favourite with those who have resided in India, is often rendered unpalatable by the same curry seasoning being used for every dish, however differently may be the viands of which it is composed. It must be evident that the same flavouring will not be suitable for a curry of chicken, of fish, or of calf's head. The seasoning should always be adapted to the character of the meat, and, if it can be ascertained, to the taste of those who have to eat it. The first thing to be attended to is to have good stock, secondly, suitable seasoning, and thirdly, plenty of properly prepared rice, for the rest of the dish is only intended to serve as a sort of relish to this most important part of it. The meat, whether it has been previously cooked or otherwise, should be cut into small convenient-sized pieces, and fried in hot butter until lightly browned, with sliced onions and mushrooms, or mushroom powder. A little good stock should then be added, which, after simmering a little while, should be thickened with curry powder, curry paste, and, if liked, a little ground rice. The boiled rice should be piled round the dish. Though fresh meat is always to be preferred as being more juicy, yet cold meat is excellent warmed up as a curry; and it should be remembered that it does not require so much stewing as fresh. When other proportions are not given, a tea-spoonful of curry powder, a teaspoonful of curry paste, a tea-spoonful of ground rice, and a breakfast-cupful of gravy may be allowed for every pound of meat. The addition of a sour apple, or a little grated cocoa-nut, or tomatoes, or cucumbers, or green gooseberries (seeded), or spinach, will greatly improve various curries. It must be remembered that the vegetables are to be stewed in the gravy until they have imparted their flavour to it, then passed through a sieve, and returned to the curry.
This is a master method rather than a single dish, and it works if you treat the proportions at the end as the recipe and the rest as technique. One change to the order of operations makes the biggest difference.
- Cook the spice, don't stir it in at the endThe instruction to thicken the simmering stock with curry powder is the weak point: raw powdered spice added to liquid tastes dusty and slightly bitter. Fry the powder and paste with the onions in the butter for a minute or two before any stock goes in, then proceed as written.
- A breakfast-cupfulRoughly 8 to 10 fl oz, about a generous cup. So per pound of meat: a cup of stock, a teaspoon each of curry powder, curry paste and ground rice.
- Season more heavily than statedA teaspoon of curry powder plus a teaspoon of paste per pound of meat is very mild by current expectations. Start with a tablespoon per pound and taste.
- Ground rice and mushroom powderGround rice is coarsely milled rice, closer in texture to semolina than to flour, sold in Asian and Caribbean shops; rice flour is an acceptable substitute and thickens without the pastiness of wheat flour. Mushroom powder is simply dried mushrooms ground in a spice grinder.
- Curry pasteThe Victorian article was a bottled preparation of spices and oil, sometimes with tamarind or another souring or savoury ingredient. Any decent jarred curry paste stands in, though it will push the flavour toward a particular region rather than the neutral "curry" of the period.
- Calf's headMentioned as an ordinary option and now effectively unobtainable outside a specialist butcher. The advice behind it still holds: match the spicing to the meat, keeping it lighter for fish and chicken.
- The vegetable additionsApple, coconut, tomato, cucumber, green gooseberry or spinach are to be stewed in the gravy, sieved, and returned. A blender does the same job in seconds; sieve afterwards if you want the smooth texture the original intends.
- Reheated meatCold cooked meat needs only long enough to heat through in the finished sauce, five to ten minutes. Fresh raw meat wants proper stewing time for its cut, an hour or more for shin or shoulder.
- YieldA pound of meat with its cup of gravy serves three, with a generous quantity of rice, which the book rightly treats as the substance of the meal.
Curry reached English cookery books through returning East India Company servants, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the later nineteenth century it was thoroughly domesticated: bottled curry powder and curry paste were sold by grocers, and the dish had become a standard way of using up cold joints. The complaint that opens this entry — that one curry powder is used for everything regardless of what is being cooked — is a recurring grumble in Anglo-Indian writing of the period. The details here mark the recipe as Anglo-Indian rather than Indian: butter and stock as the cooking medium, a thickener of ground rice, and the very English substitutions of sour apple and seeded green gooseberries where tamarind or another souring agent would have been used. The insistence that the rice is the important part and the curry only a relish may reflect an older reading of the dish, though how far later English practice reversed it is not clear from the text.