Home › The Principles of Cookery › Oude Curry
Oude Curry
Take any cold meat--beef, mutton, game, or poultry, and divide it into convenient-sized pieces. Cut a large Spanish onion into thin slices; fry these in four ounces of butter, and pour over them a quarter of a pint of good gravy. Mix a small table-spoonful of curry-powder smoothly with the sauce; add the pieces of meat, and simmer all gently together for two hours. Before serving the curry, add a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for four persons.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint, built on cold cooked meat, a mound of fried onion and a spoonful of shop-bought curry powder. Two details need attention before you start: the amount of butter and the length of the simmer.
- The simmer is far too longThe meat here is already cooked. Two hours in a quarter-pint of gravy will shred it and leave the pan dry. Twenty to thirty minutes, covered, is enough to soften the onions fully and let the sauce come together; add the meat only for the last ten minutes so it heats through without collapsing.
- Fry the powder, don't stir it inVictorian curry powder was a coarse commercial blend, and the recipe's instruction to mix it "smoothly with the sauce" leaves it tasting raw and dusty. Add it to the buttery onions and cook it a minute or two until it smells toasted before the gravy goes in.
- MeasuresA quarter of a pint in an English book of this date is 5 fl oz, about 140 ml — not much liquid, so keep the pan covered or add a little more stock. A small tablespoonful of curry powder is roughly 2 to 3 teaspoons depending on the blend's heat; a dessert-spoonful of lemon juice is about 2 teaspoons.
- ButterFour ounces is 115 g for one onion, generous even by Victorian standards. Two ounces fries the onion perfectly well; the rest was there to enrich a thin gravy, which a good stock does better.
- "Good gravy"This means proper meat gravy or reduced stock from the joint, not a thickened flour sauce. Beef or chicken stock reduced by half is the closest modern substitute.
- Spanish onionStill sold under that name — a large, mild, sweet-fleshed onion. Slice it thinly and let it go properly soft and golden; it is the body of the sauce, since nothing else thickens it.
- ServingFour portions, as the original says; plain boiled rice is the obvious accompaniment, though the recipe does not specify one. The lemon juice goes in off the heat, immediately before serving, or the brightness cooks away.
"Oude" is the older English spelling of Awadh, the kingdom around Lucknow that the East India Company annexed in 1856 — a name that would still have carried a distinct ring for readers in the 1870s and 80s. The dish itself is not Awadhi cooking in any strict sense: it is an Anglo-Indian household curry of the kind that spread through British kitchens once commercial curry powder became cheap, and its real subject is thrift. Cassell's prices it at sixpence "exclusive of the cold meat", which tells you exactly what it was for — remaking the remains of a roast into something that did not look like leftovers. The pattern of onion fried in butter, a spoonful of powder, gravy and a final squeeze of lemon recurs under other names in Victorian cookery books, sometimes distinguished only by an Indian place-name attached, which may well have been meant to lend authority.