Home › The Principles of Cookery › Indian Curry-Powder
Indian Curry-Powder
It is necessary to have all the seeds used in the preparation of curry-powder well dried. A cool oven will dry them best. Put them in at night, they will be ready for pounding in the morning. Pound together an ounce each of coriander-and poppy-seed, half an ounce of ground ginger, and the same of mustard-seed, with a quarter of an ounce of red chillies, and half a small tea-spoonful of cinnamon. Cork tightly the bottle containing this mixture.
A mild, sweet-leaning blend by modern standards, with no turmeric and no cumin — the drying and the tight cork matter more than anything else here.
- "A cool oven" overnightThis means the falling residual heat of a range banked down for the night, gentler than any setting a modern oven offers. In a modern oven use the lowest setting, or the oven light alone, for an hour or two — the aim is to drive off moisture, not to toast the seeds brown.
- The weights in cupsAn ounce of coriander seed is roughly a third to a half cup of whole seed; an ounce of poppy seed about three tablespoons. Half an ounce of ground ginger is two to three tablespoons, half an ounce of mustard seed about a tablespoon.
- A quarter-ounce of red chilliesGenuinely ambiguous: that is perhaps four to ten dried chillies depending on size, but Victorian "red chillies" varied enormously in heat and the modern equivalent could be anything from a bird's eye to a dried cayenne. Start with less and grind more in.
- No turmericThe blend will come out grey-brown rather than yellow. Turmeric was usual in period curry powders, home-made and bottled alike, largely for colour; if you want that, a teaspoon or two is the usual addition and will not upset the balance.
- Poppy seed goes rancidKhus khus is oily and stales faster than the other spices here. Buy it fresh, and treat the finished powder as good for two or three months rather than a year.
- GrindingA mortar will work for the coriander and chillies but struggles with mustard seed; an electric spice or coffee grinder does the whole lot in thirty seconds. Sieve out the coriander husk if you want a fine powder.
- Yield and useClose to a cup of powder (a little over three ounces by weight). Like any dry masala it needs frying in fat with the onions at the start of the dish, not stirred into liquid at the end, or it tastes raw and dusty.
Pre-mixed curry powder is a British invention rather than an Indian one: cooks on the subcontinent ground fresh masalas for each dish, while English kitchens wanted a single bottled compound that could sit in the store cupboard. Curry recipes appear in English cookery books from the middle of the eighteenth century onward — Hannah Glasse's 1747 Art of Cookery carries an early instruction "To make a Currey the India Way," though that is a dish recipe rather than a bottled compound — and by the time Cassell's was compiled, commercial curry powders were sold widely enough that a household blend may have been offered as an economy and a guarantee of freshness. The poppy seed is the most telling ingredient: ground khus khus is a genuine thickener in several regional Indian styles, and its presence here suggests the formula passed through Anglo-Indian hands rather than being assembled from a grocer's list. The instruction to cork the bottle tightly is the whole point of the exercise — ground spice in a damp Victorian larder did not keep its scent for long.