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Oysters, Curried, Indian
Open and beard four dozen large plump oysters, and be careful to preserve the liquor. Mince an onion very finely, and fry it in an ounce of butter until it is quite tender. Stir into it a heaped table-spoonful of curry-powder, and a little more butter, if necessary, and pour in very gradually a quarter of a pint of nicely-seasoned stock or water. When the liquid boils stir in the meat of half a cocoa-nut, rasped, and a sour apple, finely minced. Simmer gently until the apple is dissolved, then thicken the gravy with a little flour, and season with pepper and salt. Put in the oysters with their liquor and the milk of the cocoa-nut. Let the curry stew for a few minutes, and stir it gently all the time, then add a dessert-spoonful of strained lemon-juice, and when the oysters are done enough, serve on a hot dish, with a border of boiled rice. A small vegetable marrow, finely minced, or a large ripe tomato, chopped small, may be added to the curry, if either is at hand, and will be found an improvement. Time, altogether, about half an hour. Probable cost of oysters, 1s. 6d. to 3s. per dozen. Sufficient for eight or ten persons.
A Victorian Anglo-Indian curry built on a coconut and apple base, with the oysters going in only at the very end. Nearly all the half-hour belongs to the sauce.
- Add the oysters last, and brieflyThe sauce should be finished and tasted before the oysters go in. Two to three minutes in barely simmering gravy is enough — the edges will just begin to ruffle. "A few minutes" of stewing plus more time until "done enough" will give you rubber.
- BeardingTo beard an oyster is to trim off the tough dark frill of gill and mantle around the edge. With modern shucked oysters this is rarely necessary, and the step can be skipped if they are already trimmed.
- Quantity of oystersFour dozen large oysters is roughly a quart (about 1 litre) of shucked oysters with their liquor. Jarred or freshly shucked both work; strain the liquor through a fine sieve to catch shell grit.
- A quarter of a pintAn imperial quarter-pint is 5 fl oz, about 150 ml. Add it gradually to the fried curry paste so the flour-free base does not split.
- The coconut"The meat of half a cocoa-nut, rasped" is roughly 4-6 oz (115-170 g) of freshly grated coconut; unsweetened desiccated coconut is the nearest substitute, though it absorbs more liquid. "The milk of the cocoa-nut" here most likely means the thin water inside the shell rather than the pressed coconut milk sold in tins — about half a cup. A few tablespoons of tinned coconut milk gives a richer result than the original intended, which is no loss.
- Curry powderA heaped tablespoon of Victorian curry powder was generally milder and heavier on turmeric than many modern blends. Fry it in the butter for a minute before adding liquid; that step is what removes the raw, dusty taste.
- Vegetable marrowThe optional marrow is a mature summer squash. Use a young courgette or a pale summer squash, diced small.
- YieldEight to ten as one dish among several in a Victorian meal. As a main course over rice it serves four to five.
Cassell's belongs to the last decades of a long British enthusiasm for curried oysters, which appear in English cookery books from the early nineteenth century onward. The formula here — onion fried in butter, a spoonful of ready-made curry powder, coconut, a sour apple and a squeeze of lemon, thickened with flour — is the standard Anglo-Indian domestic curry of the period rather than anything from an Indian kitchen; the apple and the flour-thickened gravy are British additions. The costing is the more telling detail: at 1s. 6d. to 3s. a dozen, oysters were within comfortable reach of a middle-class household, though no longer the cheap street food of the earlier nineteenth century. The oyster beds of the Thames estuary and Whitstable were being fished hard, and within a generation overfishing, pollution and typhoid scares would push oysters firmly into the luxury bracket, where such a recipe reads as extravagance rather than economy.