Home › The Principles of Cookery › Kabobs, Curried
Kabobs, Curried
Cut up some beef, mutton, or veal, into small pieces the size of a shilling and about a quarter of an inch thick. Cut an equal number of pieces of green ginger and of onions of as nearly as possible the same size. Put them on skewers, alternating a piece of meat, a slice of onion, and a slice of ginger. Prepare a curry sauce (see CURRY SAUCE), and cook the kabobs in it. Serve with boiled rice in a separate dish.
A short entry that assumes you already have a curry sauce on hand and know how long meat takes to cook. Both gaps are worth filling before you start.
- The size of a shillingA shilling was roughly the diameter of a US quarter or a UK 10p piece, about 23-24 mm. So the pieces are thin coins of meat, a quarter inch thick, which cook through in minutes.
- The hinge: choose the cut for the methodBecause the pieces are thin and then simmered in sauce, sinewy stewing cuts will not have time to soften. Use a tender cut - sirloin, lamb leg or loin, veal escalope - and give it five to eight minutes in the sauce, or braise a tougher cut long enough to collapse. The middle ground gives you leather.
- Green gingerFresh root ginger, not preserved or dried. Slices cut to coin size and a quarter inch thick are assertive; a scant eighth of an inch is closer to modern taste, and the slices are eaten, not picked out.
- Skewers in sauceMetal or soaked bamboo, and short enough to lie flat in the pan. The book gives no browning step, but searing the loaded skewers in a little fat before they go into the sauce costs two minutes and improves everything.
- Curry sauceThe book gives nothing but the cross-reference. Victorian curry sauces of this kind were commonly flour-thickened and built on stock and onion, often with a bought curry powder. Any decent onion-and-spice gravy works; keep it loose enough to cover the kabobs and let the ginger and onion in the skewers do the aromatic work.
- YieldReckon on 6 oz of meat per person, which fills two or three short skewers. A pound and a half of meat with rice serves four.
Kabob is an Anglo-Indian spelling of the Persian and Arabic kabab, and was domesticated in English by the late nineteenth century, when a British household dictionary could print it without explanation. What is notable here is the treatment: rather than grilling the skewers over fire, as the dish is handled across much of its home range, the book stews them in curry sauce and sends rice to table in a separate dish.