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Kabobs, Beef
Take one pound of steak, cut it into thin pieces about two inches wide and six inches long, rub each piece with the juice of green ginger, and prepare a mixture as follows. Chop an onion and two heads of garlic very small, and pound twenty-four cloves in a mortar. Mix these well together with a table-spoonful of curry-powder, and add salt to taste. Lay some of this mixture on each piece of the meat, roll up, and string through skewers. Fry in butter for about ten minutes. Take out the skewers, as the meat will retain its shape, and serve with a gravy or thin brown sauce, to which a few drops of lemon-juice have been added. Boiled rice may be served with this dish.
A Victorian British-Indian kabob: thin beef rolled around a spice paste, skewered, and pan-fried. Two quantities in the original need reading carefully before you start.
- Twenty-four cloves is not a typo, but treat it as oneTwo dozen whole cloves pounded into a paste for one pound of meat will overwhelm everything, including the curry powder. Four to six cloves gives the warm background note the dish is after; taste the paste before you commit it to the beef.
- "Two heads of garlic"Two whole bulbs against one chopped onion would be extreme; it is not clear whether bulbs or cloves were meant, and two to four cloves is the safer reading.
- Green gingerFresh ginger root, as opposed to the dried ground spice. Grate it and squeeze the pulp for juice, or simply rub the meat with the grated root and its liquid.
- The cutAny thin, tender steak that will roll without splitting lor rather without cracking. Flank, skirt, or top round pounded between sheets of plastic to about a quarter inch. Slices two inches by six roll into neat cylinders.
- Curry-powder of the periodVictorian curry powders were generally built on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, and the proportion of chilli varied a good deal from blend to blend. A madras blend is arguably closer than a generic "curry powder," and a pinch of ground coriander will fill it out.
- Skewers and rollingThread the rolls crosswise so the skewer pins the seam shut, several to a skewer. Metal skewers conduct heat and help the inside cook; if you use bamboo, soak them.
- Ten minutes of fryingThat is right for quarter-inch rolls in butter over medium heat, turning to brown all sides. Butter alone will darken at that length; add a spoonful of oil, or use ghee.
- Resting before unskeweringLet the rolls sit two or three minutes off the heat before drawing the skewers out, as the recipe promises they will hold their shape. Pulling them hot loosens the seam.
- YieldOne pound of steak makes six to eight rolls, enough for two as a main course with rice, or four as part of a larger meal.
Recipes of this kind entered British cookery books through the Anglo-Indian household, where kabab covered a wide family of skewered and spiced meats rather than the single cubed-and-grilled form the word now suggests in English. A rolled-and-stuffed treatment of thin, flattened meat has Indian parallels, though it is not the same thing as a pasanda. The compiler prints an Indian method but hedges it for home use, offering "a gravy or thin brown sauce" of the standard English kitchen alongside the boiled rice. The commercial curry powder called for is itself a British blend, sold ready-mixed to cooks who had no household spice-grinder and no tradition of mixing to the dish.