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FOWL, FRIED (a la Malabar)
An Indian dish, highly recommended by an experienced cook. Fry in butter the several joints of a chicken, previously rubbed with curry-powder and a little salt. Make them of a nice light brown colour. Cut some onions into slices, separate them into rings, and again cut them into bits of half an inch. Fry them very slowly in a clean pan of clarified butter. If blackened, they will be spoiled. They should be of a delicate golden brown, and free, when done, from grease. When quite dry, sprinkle salt, and strew over the fried chicken. Serve hot and with a cut lemon on a plate. Time, twenty minutes to fry fowl. Probable cost, 3s. 6d. Sufficient for an entree.
A straightforward fried chicken with curry powder, whose whole character rests on the onions. Two things need adjusting: the onion technique, which is the hinge of the dish, and the frying time, which is short for bone-in pieces.
- The onions are the dishHalf-inch pieces of onion fried slowly in clarified butter until golden and dry are close to the fried-onion preparation often called birista, though that usually means thinner slices taken darker. Keep the heat low to moderate and stir often; the sugars scorch quickly, and once they turn bitter the whole plate is spoiled, exactly as the original warns. Drain on paper so they crisp rather than steam.
- Twenty minutes is not enoughBone-in chicken joints fried twenty minutes in butter will brown well before the thighs and drumsticks are cooked through. Expect 30-40 minutes over moderate heat with the pan partly covered, turning, and check that the thickest part of the thigh reaches 165F / 74C.
- Clarified butter, and whyClarified butter is specified for the onions, presumably because the milk solids in whole butter burn over the long, slow frying. Ghee is closely related, though it is cooked further and tastes nuttier, and is sold ready-made. For the chicken itself, where the original simply says butter, clarified butter or half butter, half neutral oil both work.
- Curry-powderVictorian commercial curry powders were generally built on turmeric, coriander and cumin, often with fenugreek, and were usually mild in chilli, though blends varied. Any standard mild curry powder is close; use roughly 2 teaspoons plus 1 teaspoon salt rubbed over a jointed 3-3 1/2 lb bird, and rub it on at least half an hour ahead.
- "The several joints"Two drumsticks, two thighs, two wings and the breast halved crosswise: eight pieces from a whole chicken. Uniform size matters more than the exact cut, since everything goes into one pan.
- Yield and service"Sufficient for an entree" means a course in a longer Victorian meal, so three to four modern portions at most as a main dish. Rice and the cut lemon are all it needs; the lemon is not garnish, it is the acid that makes the curry powder read as more than dust.
- Probable cost3s. 6d. is Victorian shillings and pence, given so a cook could price a menu. It carries no useful modern equivalent beyond telling you a whole chicken was a considered expense.
Cassell's calls this "an Indian dish, highly recommended by an experienced cook" — a formula that recurs in British cookbooks of the period. Anglo-Indian recipes often reached British kitchens through returning officers, civil servants and their households as well as through print. Malabar is the coast of what is now Kerala, and the method — chicken rubbed with spice and fried in ghee, then finished with slow-fried onions and lemon — is not far from that region's cooking, though the substitution of a ready-made "curry-powder" for a freshly ground masala is thoroughly British. Commercial curry powder was being advertised in London by the end of the eighteenth century and was a familiar middle-class store-cupboard item by the later nineteenth century, which may be part of why dishes like this one could be printed with so little explanation.