Home › The Principles of Cookery › Gravy for Curried Fish
Gravy for Curried Fish
Melt a piece of butter the size of a small egg in a saucepan, and fry two sliced onions in it until lightly browned. Drain them from the fat, and mix with them a pint and a half of good stock, and, if the flavour is liked, two sharp apples, pared and cored. Simmer gently until the onions are sufficiently tender to be pressed through a sieve, and, after this has been done, boil once more, thicken the gravy with a table-spoonful of flour and a table-spoonful of curry-powder, mixed with a little cold water, and add a pinch of salt. Boil for half an hour, and just before serving add two table-spoonfuls of good cream. Time, an hour and a quarter. Probable cost, 5d. Sufficient for a pint and a half of gravy.
A sauce base rather than a dish: onions cooked down, sieved, thickened with flour and curry powder, and finished with cream. It is meant to be poured over cooked fish, so it should be sieved smooth and rather thin.
- The hinge: add the cream off the boilTwo tablespoons of cream stirred into a sauce at a rolling boil, with acid from the apples and curry powder in it, may separate. Pull the pan off the heat, let the bubbling stop, then stir the cream in.
- "A piece of butter the size of a small egg"Roughly 1½ to 2 oz, or 3 to 4 tablespoons. Egg- and walnut-sized butter measures were common shorthand in Victorian books, a walnut being roughly half an egg.
- A pint and a halfImperial measure, so 30 fl oz, or about 3½ US cups. The stated yield is the same pint and a half that goes in, so keep a little extra stock at hand to loosen it after the long boil.
- Curry powderLate-Victorian commercial curry powder was turmeric-heavy and mild by current standards. Modern blends are stronger, so start with two teaspoons of the tablespoon, taste after it has simmered, and add the rest if wanted.
- Bloom the spiceRather than stirring the curry powder in as a cold water slurry, current practice is to fry it with the onions in the butter for a minute before the stock goes in. Boiled raw in liquid it stays dusty and flat.
- The half-hour boilA boil of that length would also have served to cook out the raw taste of the flour slurry. A gentle simmer with the lid ajar does much the same with less reduction; ten to fifteen minutes is likely enough if you have toasted the spice first.
- The apples"Sharp apples" means a cooking variety — Bramley, Granny Smith. They dissolve into the sauce and give the sweet-sour note that Anglo-Indian curry sauces of the period relied on in place of tamarind.
- SievingPress the onion and apple through a sieve with the back of a ladle, as directed, or use a blender and then strain. The texture should be pourable, not chunky.
- Yield and costA pint and a half of sauce, about 3½ US cups, as the recipe states. "Probable cost, 5d." is five pence in pre-decimal money, a costing habit the book applies to most entries.
Curried fish gravy belongs to the Anglo-Indian strand that runs all through late-Victorian English cookery books, arriving with returning colonial households and settling into the British repertoire as a way of using cooked or leftover fish. The construction here -- browned onion, stock, sharp apple, commercial curry powder, a flour thickening and a cream finish -- is thoroughly English rather than Indian: the apple stands in for souring agents like tamarind or green mango, and the pre-mixed powder replaces spices ground fresh for each dish.