Home › The Principles of Cookery › Fowl, Country Captain
Fowl, Country Captain
Cut a fowl into pieces; sprinkle it with fine salt and curry-powder, and fry it brown in butter along with a small chopped onion. Then put it into a saucepan with a pint of broth; stew slowly down to a half-pint, and serve with rice. Probable cost, 3s.
A four-line curry that depends almost entirely on the reduction: the pint of broth is the sauce, and it has to come down by half before it tastes of anything. Everything else is straightforward.
- The hingeStew it slowly down to a half-pint, uncovered or with the lid ajar, so the broth concentrates into a clinging sauce. Covered and left alone it will stay watery, and the dish has no thickener, no coconut, no tomato and no cream to save it.
- A fowlIn Victorian usage generally a mature bird, tougher, richer and slower-cooking than anything sold today. Use a 3 to 4 lb chicken jointed into eight, and expect the meat to be tender in 35 to 45 minutes of gentle stewing rather than the much longer simmering an old boiling hen would want.
- The pintCassell's is a British book, so a pint is 20 fl oz — about 2.5 cups. Reduce to roughly 1.25 cups of liquid.
- Curry-powderVictorian curry powders were typically coriander- and turmeric-based, and varied widely in heat. Start with a tablespoon over the jointed bird, taste the sauce as it reduces, and add more toward the end; here the powder is fried onto the chicken in butter, which is worth doing properly for the toasted flavour.
- Frying brownButter alone can darken and burn before the skin colours. Clarified butter, or butter with a spoonful of neutral oil, holds up better; the recipe adds the onion with the chicken, though putting it in after the pieces have taken colour gives cleaner browning.
- BrothUnsalted or low-salt stock only. Reducing a salted commercial stock by half, on top of the salt already on the chicken, will make the sauce inedible.
- Yield and servingServes three to four with plain boiled long-grain rice. The 3s. is the book's estimate of the cost of the dish as a whole, and has no meaningful modern equivalent.
"Country captain" is Anglo-Indian kitchen English, and one explanation among several traces the name to the captains of the "country ships" — vessels trading along the Indian coast rather than home to Britain — who were said to be served a quick fried curry of this kind in port. It reached British cookery books through returning East India Company families, and by the time Cassell's compiled its dictionary it had settled into the plain, brothy, curry-powder form seen here, a long way from any regional Indian dish. The same name travelled to the American South, where a tomato-and-almond version became associated with Savannah and the Georgia coast. Its appearance in this book, as the alphabetical entry "Fowl, Country Captain", shows how thoroughly curry powder had become an ordinary British storecupboard item by the end of the nineteenth century.