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Lobster Curry
Pick the meat from the shell of a freshly-boiled medium-sized lobster, and cut it into neat square pieces. Mix a dessert-spoonful of curry smoothly with a quarter of a pint of good stock. Mince two onions finely. Fry them in a little butter until they are tender without being browned, dredge a tea-spoonful of flour over them, pour over them the curry powder and stock, and stir the mixture until it thickens. Put in the pieces of lobster, and stew gently for half an hour. Just before serving, add a table-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Put the lobster on a hot dish, pour the sauce over it, and send rice boiled as for curries to table with it. Probable cost, 2s. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A late-Victorian curry of the mild, flour-thickened English kind, and one where the stated timing is the thing to ignore.
- Half an hour is far too longAlready-boiled lobster needs only two or three minutes in the hot sauce to warm through. Thirty minutes of stewing turns it stringy and cottony. Build and simmer the sauce for the half hour if you like the flavour developed, then add the lobster at the end.
- Quantities in modern termsA quarter of a pint of stock is 5 fl oz (about 140 ml) in the imperial measure this book uses. A dessert-spoonful is roughly 2 teaspoons; Victorian spoon measures were not standardised, so treat the tablespoon as approximate.
- "A dessert-spoonful of curry"This means curry powder, not paste; the recipe itself later says 'the curry powder and stock'. Victorian commercial blends were generally mild and turmeric-heavy, and a modern madras powder at the same volume will be considerably hotter and more assertive. Taste as you go.
- Bloom the powderThe instruction to pour the powder over the softened onions with the stock works, but the flavour is better if you stir the powder into the buttery onions for a minute before the liquid goes in. Raw curry powder in a thin sauce tastes dusty.
- Stock"Good stock" is unspecified here and would most likely have meant whatever household stock was to hand. Fish or light chicken stock suits the dish better than beef; the lobster shells simmered twenty minutes make the best version of all.
- A medium lobsterRoughly a 1 to 1 1/4 lb lobster, yielding about 4 to 6 oz of picked meat. Keep the coral and any green tomalley and beat it into the sauce at the end for colour and depth.
- "Rice boiled as for curries"In this period that meant long-grain rice boiled hard in plenty of salted water, drained, and dried in a low oven or by the fire until the grains stood separate. Basmati cooked by absorption gives the same effect with less fuss.
- Yield and costThree or four as the book has it, though as a main course with rice it is closer to two.
Curry powder had been a fixture of English kitchens for a century by the time Cassell's was compiled, sold ready-blended by grocers and treated as a seasoning in its own right rather than as a set of separate spices. That is why the recipe reads like a velout ogether in in butter, a dredge of flour, stock, thickening, then the main ingredient folded through. Fish and shellfish curries of this pattern suited the acid finish of lemon juice. Modern cooks have largely reversed the instinct to cook shellfish long and thoroughly.