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Malabar Curry
Mix together a table-spoonful of curry-powder and half that quantity of flour; cut a fowl into neat pieces, and cover these with the mixture. Shred an onion, and brown it in a stewpan with a good lump of butter; put the pieces of fowl into the same butter, add more if necessary, and when they have nearly absorbed the butter, moisten with a cup of good white stock or broth, and shake the pan for a minute or two, then pour in the remainder of a pint, and stew until done. Part of a rasped cocoanut will greatly improve the curry; it helps also to thicken it. Grate it just before it is wanted, and mix it well into the curry by shaking the pan over the fire. Just before serving, flavour with half the juice of a lemon and half a wine-glassful of vinegar. Season with salt, and send plain boiled rice to table in a separate dish. Serve hot. Time, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 4s. Sufficient for four persons.
A straightforward Anglo-Indian braise: spiced flour on jointed chicken, butter, onion, stock, coconut, and a sharp finish. Two things decide whether it works — how gently the coated fowl is browned, and holding the acid back until the end.
- Don't scorch the spiceThe fowl goes into hot butter already dusted with curry powder and flour, and ground spice burns in well under a minute. Keep the heat moderate and turn the pieces steadily; bitter, blackened powder cannot be rescued later.
- A pint of stockAn imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2½ US cups. A cup goes in first to loosen the pan, the rest follows once the flour has taken up the butter.
- Wine-glassfulIn Victorian cookery books a wine-glass is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz, so half of one is roughly 1 fl oz, about two tablespoons of vinegar. With half a lemon alongside, that is a deliberately sharp finish; add the vinegar in stages and taste.
- FowlA Victorian fowl was an older, tougher bird than a supermarket chicken. Three-quarters of an hour will overcook modern jointed chicken — thighs and drumsticks want about 30-35 minutes at a bare simmer, breast pieces less. Cook to firm, not falling apart.
- Rasped cocoanut"Rasped" or grated fresh coconut, added late, both flavours and thickens. Unsweetened desiccated coconut will stand in if soaked briefly in a little of the hot stock; sweetened flaked coconut does not belong here. The recipe specifies only "part of a" coconut, so quantity is a matter of taste — a couple of ounces is a reasonable starting point.
- StewpanA heavy pan of the kind a modern sauté pan or shallow casserole answers to. Room for the pieces to lie loosely helps, since the recipe's shaking of the pan is how the coconut is worked through the sauce; the thickening comes from the flour and the coconut.
- Curry-powderNineteenth-century commercial curry powders were typically coriander- and turmeric-heavy, and generally milder than the hotter blends now sold. A tablespoon of a modern hot blend will read very differently; a mild Madras-style powder is nearer the original.
- Yield and costFour servings, with plain boiled rice served separately rather than under the curry. The 4s. is the book's own "probable cost" and cannot be converted usefully.
Curry reached British domestic cookery largely through Britain's commercial and colonial presence in India, and by the time Cassell's was compiled in the 1870s commercially blended curry powder was a normal pantry item in an English kitchen. The Malabar coast of south-western India gives the dish its name, and the coconut and the sharp souring with lemon and vinegar do gesture at that region's cooking, where fresh coconut and a souring agent such as kokum or tamarind are standard. What has been lost in translation is the fresh grinding: a Malabar cook would have wet-ground spices and coconut into a paste, where the English version reaches for ready-mixed powder and a dredge of flour to thicken. The result is less an Indian dish than a record of what Victorian Britain thought an Indian dish was — and the instruction to send plain boiled rice "in a separate dish" is very much the English dinner table asserting itself.