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Game Curry
Take one or more wild birds, according to the size of the dish you require. Cut them into convenient-sized joints, rather small than large, and fry these in hot butter till lightly browned. Score the joints slightly in one or two places, place a little curry-powder in each opening, and squeeze over it the juice of a lemon. Cover the joints with good brown gravy, and let them simmer gently for twenty minutes. Allow a table-spoonful of curry-powder, a dessert-spoonful of the pounded white of a cocoa-nut, a dessert-spoonful of the pulp of an acid apple, and a quarter of a pint of good gravy to every pound of meat. Simmer a quarter of an hour longer. Serve with rice round the dish. Probable cost, uncertain. Sufficient, one moderate-sized bird for two persons.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian treatment of pheasant, partridge or grouse, built on a brown gravy rather than an onion base. The measurements are workable once the spoon sizes and the coconut are translated.
- Cook the spice, don't just add itPushing raw curry powder into slits in the meat leaves a dusty, bitter edge, since ground spice needs fat and heat to lose its rawness. Frying the powder in the butter with the joints for a minute before the gravy goes in gives the same flavour without the harshness.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons; a tablespoonful is roughly 15-18 ml, so a little larger than the modern spoon. A tablespoon of curry powder per pound of meat is assertive by modern standards — start with two-thirds of it and correct at the end.
- Quarter of a pintFive fluid ounces, or a scant 2/3 cup, of gravy per pound of meat — one gill in the older reckoning. That is a coating sauce, not a soup; expect it to reduce and thicken as it simmers.
- Pounded white of a cocoa-nutThe white flesh of a fresh coconut, grated and crushed to a paste. Unsweetened desiccated coconut, or a spoonful of creamed coconut, does the same job; sweetened flake does not.
- Acid appleA sharp cooking apple — Bramley, or a firm Granny Smith — stewed to pulp with a spoonful of water. It supplies the sourness that a Victorian kitchen got from apple rather than tamarind or yoghurt.
- "Good brown gravy"The recipe assumes a ready-made brown gravy of the kind such books kept on hand. A well-reduced game or beef stock, lightly thickened, is the nearest equivalent; a thin stock cube will taste flat under this much spice.
- Timing and the birdsThirty-five minutes of total simmering suits legs and thighs of young birds. Breast meat from pheasant or partridge dries out well before that, so add it for the last ten minutes, or use legs and thighs alone and roast the breasts separately.
- Serving"Rice round the dish" means a border of plain boiled long-grain rice piped or spooned around the edge with the curry in the centre. One moderate bird feeds two, as the original states; two pheasants will stretch to four with rice and a chutney.
Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s and 80s for households where curry was already an established English dish rather than a novelty — commercial curry powder was being advertised in London by the late eighteenth century, and by this date many general cookery books carried a handful of curries alongside the hashes and rissoles. The tell-tale Victorian signature here is the trio of curry powder, coconut and stewed acid apple, a formula found in Beeton and her contemporaries, which stood in for the sourness and richness that an Indian cook would have drawn from tamarind, coconut milk or curds. Game birds arrived at the country house in gluts and in variable condition, and curry, like salmi and devilling, was one of the standard ways of dealing with a bird past its best or too small to roast on its own. The frank "Probable cost, uncertain" probably reflects that game was as often shot or given as bought.