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INDIAN CURRY (another way)
Beat up two eggs with a quarter of a pint of milk, and beat well into the milk a slice of bread previously soaked in milk. Pound a few sweet almonds, and fry a sliced onion in an ounce of butter. Mix all well together with a table-spoonful of curry, another ounce of butter, and six or eight ounces of minced fowl or other cold cooked meat, seasoned with salt. Melt a little butter with some lemon-juice, rub a baking-dish with it, and fill with the curry. Serve boiled rice separately. Time, half an hour. Probable cost, 1s., exclusive of the meat.
Despite the name this is not a stewed curry but a baked savoury custard — closer to a gratin or a loaf — built to use up cold roast meat. The eggs and milk are the structure, so treat it as a custard and do not overheat it.
- The hinge: bake it gentlyThe original gives a time but no temperature. Bake at 325-350F until just set in the centre, roughly the half hour stated for a shallow dish. Pushed hotter, the egg curdles and weeps liquid around the meat.
- A quarter of a pintImperial measure, so 5 fl oz, about 140 ml or a little under two-thirds of a US cup. With two eggs that gives a firm, sliceable set rather than a loose custard.
- "A table-spoonful of curry"Curry powder is meant. Victorian commercial blends were generally milder and more turmeric-forward than many modern ones; start with two teaspoons of a hot contemporary powder and taste the mixture before it goes into the dish.
- Sweet almondsSimply ordinary almonds — the qualifier distinguishes them from bitter almonds, which older books listed separately and which are little used in the domestic kitchen today and restricted for sale in some countries. Blanched almonds pounded to a coarse paste, or a tablespoon of ground almonds, does the job.
- Bloom the powderAdd the curry powder to the onion while it fries in the butter rather than stirring it into the egg mixture raw. Thirty seconds in hot fat removes the chalky taste that otherwise survives a low-temperature bake.
- The breadA slice of a plain white loaf, crust removed, soaked and mashed smooth. It is a binder; stale bread absorbs better than fresh, and lumps will show in the finished cut.
- "Minced fowl or other cold cooked meat"Six to eight ounces of chopped, not pureed, cooked chicken, lamb or beef. Cut it small enough to hold together when sliced but coarse enough to read as meat.
- Yield and servingEnough for two as a main course or three or four as a light dish, with the boiled rice served separately as directed.
- Probable costOne shilling excluding the meat — a note aimed at a cook keeping household accounts, and a reminder that the dish existed to stretch leftovers rather than to feature them.
Cassell's offers several "Indian curries," and this one shows how far the word had drifted from anything cooked in India: bread, eggs, milk and almonds bound into a baked custard, with a spoonful of shop-bought curry powder standing in for a spice repertoire. Commercial curry powder had been sold in Britain since the late eighteenth century and by the time this dictionary appeared it was a store-cupboard staple, treated much as a flavouring essence — a way to make Monday's cold fowl interesting rather than an attempt at a regional dish. The Anglo-Indian connection is real enough, carried home by returning East India Company families, but recipes like this belong to the British domestic economy of using up cooked meat, a genre that also produced rissoles, croquettes and mince pies of the savoury kind. The instruction to serve rice separately is the one clear survival of the original model, where rice accompanies rather than mixes.