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Pheasant, Curried
Cut the remains of cold cooked pheasant into nice-sized pieces, and stew them gently in half a pint of good curry sauce. Add a table-spoonful of mango chutney, and the same of desiccated cocoa-nut, and serve in a border of boiled rice.
A leftovers dish that assumes you already have a pot of curry sauce standing by, as a Victorian kitchen often did. The whole job takes about fifteen minutes once the sauce exists.
- The hinge: gentle heat, briefThe pheasant is already cooked, so it is only being warmed through in the sauce. Five to eight minutes at a bare simmer is enough; a rolling boil will squeeze the last moisture out of lean game and leave it stringy.
- Half a pint of curry sauceAn Imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, so about a cup and a quarter. The book presumably expects you to turn to its own curry sauce recipe. A good bought korma or medium curry sauce of similar thickness will stand in.
- Desiccated cocoa-nutUnsweetened desiccated coconut, which is still sold as such. Do not substitute sweetened flaked coconut for baking; the sugar will throw the sauce out. A tablespoon thickens and softens the sauce slightly as it hydrates.
- Mango chutneyPeriod chutneys were often sharper and less sugary than many jarred Major Grey styles. If yours is very sweet, add a squeeze of lemon at the end to bring the sauce back into balance.
- If you have no pheasantLeftover roast chicken, guinea fowl or turkey thigh works on the same terms. Pheasant is much leaner than chicken, which is precisely why it is being rescued in sauce rather than reheated dry.
- Bones and skinPick the meat off cleanly and discard the skin, which goes flabby on reheating. Pheasant carcasses make an excellent stock, worth simmering while the curry finishes if you intend to make the sauce yourself.
- A border of boiled riceLong-grain rice, cooked and drained dry, pressed into a ring mould or shaped with a spoon around the edge of a hot dish, curry spooned into the well. A plain bed of rice serves the same purpose if the presentation does not matter.
- YieldThe remains of one cold pheasant with this quantity of sauce will serve about two.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of the late Victorian household, and dishes of this kind sit in Cassell's alongside entries for curried rabbit, veal, lobster and cold mutton. Curry powder had been sold commercially in Britain since the late eighteenth century, and by the 1890s it functioned less as an Indian dish than as a domestic technique for making cold meat appear again as something else -- the same economy that produced rissoles and hashes. Pheasant reached the table in quantity between October and the end of January, and a bird roasted for one dinner was expected to furnish the next; the desiccated coconut and mango chutney here are the standard Anglo-Indian sweet-and-sharp finish of the period, not marks of an authentic regional recipe.