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FOWL, CURRIED (a l'Indienne)
Great care is required in the preparation of this excellent curry. Take a tender young fowl, pluck, draw, and singe it in the usual way, and cut it into small neat pieces convenient for serving. Mix a dessert-spoonful of curry-powder, a dessert-spoonful of curry paste, and a tea-spoonful of ground rice, and rub the mixture to a smooth paste with a little cold stock. Stir in gradually one pint of boiling stock; pour the sauce into a delicately clean stewpan, and stir it over the fire till it is smooth and thick. Put a quarter of a pound of butter into a frying-pan, and slice up six large onions, three or four tomatoes, three cloves of garlic; chop up also an ounce of raisins without stones; fry all, and brown the pieces of fowl a nice colour in the same butter. Pour the curry gravy over the fried fowl, move the stewpan to the side, simmer gently till done, then add the juice of half a lemon and serve. Time, about two hours to simmer the fowl. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for five persons.
A late-Victorian Anglo-Indian curry built on stock and a thickened sauce rather than on a slow-cooked onion base. The method works, but two of the quantities and one of the times need adjusting.
- The hinge: don't simmer two hoursTwo hours will reduce a young chicken to threads. Bone-in pieces of a 3-4 lb bird need 30-40 minutes at a bare simmer; thighs take the longest, breast pieces can come out at 20 minutes and be returned at the end.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoon is about 2 teaspoons, so the seasoning here amounts to roughly 2 tsp curry powder and 2 tsp curry paste for a whole bird plus a pint of stock. That will taste mild to a modern palate; a tablespoon of each if you want it more assertive.
- Curry pasteThe commercial "curry paste" of the period was an oily, vinegared concentrate of spices, closer to a Madras paste than to a Thai one. Any decent jarred Indian curry paste stands in.
- Ground rice as thickenerGround rice is milled raw rice, not ground cooked rice. A teaspoon in a pint of stock gives only a light body rather than a true thickening.
- Six onions and a quarter pound of butterSix large onions is a great deal for one bird, and 4 oz (115 g) of butter will make the finished dish very rich. Three or four onions and 2 oz of butter, or half butter and half oil, gives a better balance and less risk of the butter browning too hard while the onions cook down.
- "Pluck, draw, and singe"Skip to jointing: two thighs, two drumsticks, two wings, and the breast cut into four. Save the back and any trimmings for the pint of stock the recipe assumes you have on hand.
- YieldFive as written, served with plain boiled rice. Add the lemon juice off the heat so it stays sharp.
Cassell's places this among the standard Anglo-Indian dishes that had become English domestic cooking by the 1870s and 80s, when curry powder and bottled curry paste were widely available. The subtitle a l'Indienne may suggest that the dish is filtered through French professional kitchen practice, which would account for its being built as a sauce made separately with stock and a starch and then poured over fried meat, rather than as the layered onion-and-spice base of an Indian kitchen. The raisins and the finishing lemon juice belong to the same tradition of sweet-sour British curry. The costing of 3s. 6d. for five people, given as a matter of course, reflects a book written for households keeping accounts, in which the price of a dish mattered as much to the reader as its flavour.