Home › The Principles of Cookery › Mutton, Curried, Plain
Mutton, Curried, Plain
For a curry of cooked meat, cut the mutton into thin slices, or into dice, according to the quantity of meat to be curried. Put two ounces or more of butter into a stewpan, and two good-sized onions, chopped. Stir the onions in the butter until of a pale brown, add an ounce of curry-powder, and the same of flour, with a little salt; mix and stir for five minutes, moisten with a cup of stock, and stew gently for a few minutes longer. Put in the meat, and simmer until done, but do not let it boil. Serve with rice round the dish.
A Victorian way with cold roast mutton: the curry is built as a sauce first, and the already-cooked meat is only warmed through in it. Nearly everything that can go wrong here goes wrong at the last step.
- Never let it boilThe meat is cooked already, and the recipe says plainly not to let it boil. Boiling squeezes the slices dry and stringy. Hold the pan at a bare shiver until the meat is hot through.
- An ounce of curry powderThat is roughly three to four level tablespoons, a great deal by modern habit, and it assumes the mild ready-blended powder of the period, generally heavy on coriander and turmeric. With a hot commercial powder or a garam-masala-forward blend, start with half and taste.
- Frying the powderThe five minutes of stirring the powder and flour in the butter is the point of the dish, not a formality. Raw curry powder tastes dusty and bitter; cooking it in fat over gentle heat until it smells nutty is what gives the sauce depth. Keep the heat low so the flour does not scorch.
- A cup of stockThe book does not define its cup; a Victorian teacupful is somewhere in the region of 5 to 8 fl oz. With a full ounce of flour in the pan the sauce will be on the thick side, so have a little more stock at hand, since it tightens further while the meat warms.
- StewpanA wide, heavy saucepan or sauté pan with a lid. Width matters more than depth so the sliced meat sits in one layer and heats evenly.
- MuttonTrue mutton, from a sheep over a year old, is scarce outside specialist butchers. Cold roast lamb leg or shoulder behaves the same way; trim hard fat, which will not render in so short a simmer.
- Rice round the dishPlain boiled long-grain rice, drained dry and pressed into a border on a hot platter with the curry spooned into the well. The recipe leaves the amount of meat open -- "according to the quantity of meat to be curried" -- but this much sauce will carry something like 1 to 1 1/2 lb of cooked meat, enough for four.
- Worth addingThe recipe is deliberately plain and reads flat to a modern palate. A squeeze of lemon or a spoonful of chutney stirred in at the end lifts it without changing its character.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of British middle-class cookery long before Cassell's compiled this dictionary in the late nineteenth century, and the logic is domestic economy as much as taste: a large joint of roast mutton was, in an often-repeated account of the middle-class week, served hot on Sunday, cold on Monday, and curried, hashed or rissoled thereafter. Commercial curry powders, sold ready-blended by British grocers from the late eighteenth century onward, made this possible for cooks with no knowledge of Indian spicing. The dish belongs to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that returned to Britain with East India Company families, but by this book's date it had been thoroughly domesticated han any English sself sauce, and ringed with plain boiled rice in the manner Victorian cookery writers recommended for anything served in a sauce.