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OYSTERS, CURRIED (another way)
Cut a large onion, or two middle-sized ones, into thin slices, and fry them in butter until brown. Dredge into the pan four dessert-spoonfuls of curry-powder, and stir in two ounces more of butter. When the mixture is quite smooth, thin it with half a pint of good warm broth, and keep it stirred until it boils. Put it into a clean stewpan with the white part of a finely-grated cocoa-nut and a minced sour apple, when it must be again made to boil. Stir until the apple is dissolved, and the cocoa-nut is tender, then mix a little flour and water as thickening, and when thick add the oysters (a hundred, carefully bearded, with their liquor strained), also the milk of the cocoa-nut, if sweet. Simmer until the oysters are hot. Serve on a hot dish, with boiled rice in another. Time, twenty-five minutes to make curry; one minute to stew oysters. Sufficient for six persons.
A late-Victorian curry built on a fried-onion and coconut base, with the oysters added at the very end. The proportions are generous by modern standards and the coconut instructions need translating.
- The hinge: one minute means one minuteThe oysters go in only after the sauce is finished and thickened, and they need just long enough to heat through and firm slightly at the edges. Held at a simmer for more than a couple of minutes they tighten into rubber and leach liquid that thins the sauce.
- A hundred oystersThis means a hundred shucked oysters with their liquor, on the order of 2½ to 3 quarts of shucked meats — a large amount even for six. Two 16 oz containers of shucked oysters will feed six comfortably; scale the sauce as written and it will still be ample.
- BeardingThe beard is the dark frilled gill tissue. On modern shucked oysters it is usually already gone or negligible; if you are shucking your own, pull it away and strain the liquor through muslin to catch shell grit.
- Half a pint of brothAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Use a light chicken or fish stock; the oyster liquor added later will bring plenty of salinity, so hold back on salt until the end.
- Four dessert-spoonfuls of curry-powderA dessertspoon is about 2 teaspoons, so roughly 8 teaspoons — a little under 3 tablespoons. Period curry powders were typically heavy on turmeric and coriander and are generally reckoned to have been less fiery than many modern blends; start with 2 tablespoons of a contemporary madras powder and taste.
- The two coconuts"The white part of a finely-grated cocoa-nut" is the fresh meat, which from a whole nut is more like 8 to 14 oz grated; unsweetened desiccated coconut, soaked briefly in warm stock, is the practical substitute. "The milk of the cocoa-nut, if sweet" means the thin water inside the shell, not the pressed cream sold in cans — the caution about sweetness is because that water sours quickly.
- Frying the spiceDredging the powder into the hot pan and adding more butter is a roux-and-bloom in one step. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; curry powder scorches in well under a minute and turns bitter.
- ThickeningThe flour-and-water slurry should go in before the oysters and be boiled out for a minute or two, otherwise it tastes raw — and once the oysters are in there is no time left to cook it.
- ServingSix portions as written, with plain boiled rice served separately in the Anglo-Indian manner rather than under the curry.
Curried oysters belong to the Anglo-Indian cooking that had settled firmly into British domestic kitchens by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared, when bottled curry powder was a grocery staple and "curry" meant a sauce built on onions, commercial spice mixture and stock rather than any particular regional dish. The coconut and sour apple are the signatures of that hybrid style: the apple stands in for tamarind or other souring agents, and it dissolves into the sauce to give body and a faint sweetness. Oysters had been cheap and abundant in Britain in the earlier part of the nineteenth century, and cooks used them freely in soups, patties, sauces and stuffings in a way that reads as extravagant only after the beds were fished out from the 1860s and prices rose sharply.