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Kuwab Fowl
Put four cloves, a salt-spoonful of pounded ginger, a salt-spoonful of cayenne, and half an ounce of coriander-seed in a mortar. Pound these until quite smooth, and mix with them three small onions, finely minced. Divide a small chicken into neat joints; rub them inside and out with the mixture, and put them into a frying-pan, with a quarter of a pound of sweet butter. Turn them about constantly, and when they are brightly browned all over and sufficiently cooked, squeeze over them the strained juice of a lemon, and serve as hot as possible. Time to cook, half an hour. Probable cost of chicken, 2s. 6d. Sufficient for two or three persons. L
A dry-spiced Anglo-Indian pan-fry that reads oddly to modern eyes because the spice paste goes on raw chicken and then straight into hot butter. Managing that butter is the whole job.
- The hinge: keep the butter from burningA quarter-pound of butter with minced onion and ground spice in it will scorch long before a jointed chicken is cooked through. Use a wide pan over medium heat, or clarify the butter first, and pull the pan off the burner if the paste starts to darken past nut-brown.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter of a teaspoon. Note that the recipe contains no salt at all beyond that measure's name; season the joints properly or the dish tastes flat under all the spice.
- Half an ounce of coriander-seedAbout 15 g, roughly three tablespoons of whole seed. Toasting it dry in the pan for a minute before pounding will bring out more aroma than pounding it raw.
- Pounded gingerDried ginger ground to powder, not fresh root. A quarter-teaspoon of ground ginger is the intended quantity.
- Sweet butterUnsalted butter. A quarter of a pound is 115 g, which is generous for one chicken; two ounces is plenty if you would rather not finish with a pool of fat.
- A small chickenProbably a bird of around 2.5 lb or less by modern reckoning, cut into neat joints. Birds sold today run larger, so buy at the small end or the half-hour timing will not be enough.
- Time and donenessHalf an hour of constant turning suits small joints. Judge by temperature rather than colour, since the spice paste browns early: 165F/74C at the thickest part of the thigh.
- YieldTwo to three as the original says, with rice or flatbread. On its own it is a light dish for two.
"Kuwab" is one of many nineteenth-century English spellings of kabab, a word ultimately Arabic in origin that reached English through Persian, Urdu and Turkish, and settled eventually as "kebab". Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households in the 1870s and 1880s, carried a scattering of such recipes because returning officers, civil servants and their cooks had made spiced Indian dishes a familiar part of the English table — usually simplified, usually built from the dry spices a British grocer actually stocked. What survives here is the method rather than any one regional original: whole spices pounded in a mortar with onion, rubbed into meat, fried hard in fat and finished with sour lemon juice. The absence of any liquid or lid is what distinguishes it from a curry, as is the reliance on cloves and coriander rather than a proprietary curry powder.