Home › The Principles of Cookery › Indian Burdwan
Indian Burdwan
A very savoury and highly-approved Indian dish. The joints of a parboiled fowl are generally used for this dish, but if necessary the remains of chicken or fowls that have been served before, and even rabbit, veal, or lamb, may be warmed up in the sauce, for which the following is the recipe. Peel and chop very finely four shallots and an onion. Put them into a stewpan with a small cup of good stock, a table-spoonful of the essence of anchovies, a little cayenne, and an ounce of butter rolled in flour. Stir over the fire until the sauce is ready to boil, then put it aside to simmer till the onions are done, adding a small cupful of mixed Indian pickles, cut into less than half-inch pieces, a table-spoonful of chilli vinegar, and one or two glasses of wine, Madeira or sherry. Simmer the sauce to make the pickles tender, and pour in the wine when the fowl is ready to be stewed. Skin and lay the fowl in neat pieces into the stewpan with the sauce, and if the bird has been only parboiled, stew it gently for fifteen or twenty minutes, but for a thoroughly cooked fowl serve as soon as it is ready to boil, with the juice of a fresh lime. Rice is sometimes served with Burdwan as with curry. INDIAN BURDWAN (another way). (See BURDWAN, INDIAN.)
A Victorian devilled hash dressed up as an Anglo-Indian stew. The sauce is the dish; the meat is whatever needs using up.
- The hingeIf the meat is already cooked, it goes in only long enough to heat through — bring the sauce back to the point of boiling and serve. Fifteen minutes of simmering, as allowed for parboiled fowl, will turn leftover roast chicken stringy.
- Essence of anchoviesA thin, sharp Victorian bottled sauce, not modern anchovy paste, which is far denser. Use about a teaspoon of paste thinned with a little water, or a tablespoon of Worcestershire-style anchovy sauce, and taste before adding more salt.
- "Butter rolled in flour"Beurre manié: one ounce (2 tbsp) of soft butter kneaded with roughly the same volume of flour, dropped into the liquid in pieces. It thickens as it melts; do not let it sit undisturbed on the bottom.
- Cups and glassesA "small cup" of stock is about 5–6 fl oz (150 ml). A wine glass in this period is roughly 2 fl oz (60 ml), so "one or two glasses" means 60–120 ml of Madeira or sherry — a substantial amount in a sauce this size, so add the smaller quantity first.
- Mixed Indian picklesBottled mixed pickle of the Anglo-Indian kind, fruit and vegetables in spiced vinegar or mustard. Any jarred South Asian mixed achar works; drain it, chop small, and taste before adding salt, since the pickle brings its own.
- Chilli vinegarNot a commercial hot sauce. Steep a few dried red chillies in white wine or cider vinegar for a week, or substitute a tablespoon of plain vinegar with a pinch of extra cayenne.
- StewpanA lidded pan of the general-purpose sort; a saute pan or wide saucepan will do, with the pieces of fowl lying in the sauce rather than piled up.
- YieldNot stated. The quantity of sauce would suit a jointed fowl or something over a pound of cooked meat; four servings with rice is a reasonable guess.
- Cross-referenceThe final line is the dictionary's index pointing to its own alphabetical entry under B, not part of the method.
Burdwan (now Bardhaman, in West Bengal) gave its name to a dish that has little to do with Bengali cooking and a great deal to do with the British in India: a peppery, vinegary, anchovy-sharpened sauce for reheating cold birds, close cousin to the "devil". It appears in late-Victorian English cookery as one way of dealing with the remains of yesterday's roast fowl -- it is essentially a recipe for a sauce, with the meat left deliberately vague. The reliance on bottled essences, mixed pickle and chilli vinegar is typical of Anglo-Indian cookery of the period, which reached for the grocer's shelf where an Indian kitchen would have ground its own spices.