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Pork, Curried
Take two pounds of pork with a moderate share of fat. Cut it into neat slices, and fry these in a little butter until they are nicely browned; drain them, and put them aside. Put into the butter six onions and one apple finely minced. Move them about until they are quite soft, and work them through a sieve by pressing them with the back of a wooden spoon. Mix with the pulp a table-spoonful of curry-powder, a table-spoonful of curry-paste, a dessert-spoonful of ground rice, three-quarters of a pint of stock or water, and a little salt. Stir the sauce over the fire till it boils, put in the slices of pork, let these boil up, then draw the saucepan to the side of the fire, and simmer gently until the curry is done enough. Take out the pieces of meat, boil the sauce quickly for two or three minutes, pour it over the curry, and serve. Send a little rice to table on a separate dish. Time to boil the curry, three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, pork, 10d. per pound. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A straightforward Anglo-Indian braise: the sauce is built entirely from sieved onion and apple rather than flour, which is what gives it body. Two details do most of the work — using a cut with enough fat and connective tissue, and keeping the pot at a bare simmer once the meat goes back in.
- The cut"Pork with a moderate share of fat" means shoulder or neck end, not loin or tenderloin. Three-quarters of an hour at a simmer will turn lean modern pork stringy; shoulder cut into thick slices or 1½-inch chunks holds up and improves.
- Six onions is not a misprintThe onion and apple pulp is the sauce — there is no roux and only a teaspoon or two of starch. Use about 1½ lb of onions and one tart apple, and cook them slowly until genuinely soft and sweet, not just translucent.
- SievingThe instruction to press the softened onions through a sieve with a wooden spoon is a Victorian workaround for a smooth sauce. A stick blender in the pan does the same job in seconds; sieve afterwards only if you want it silky.
- MeasuresA dessert-spoonful is two teaspoons. Three-quarters of an Imperial pint is 15 fl oz, or a little under two US cups (about 425 ml). Ground rice is milled rice, usually a slightly coarser grind than rice flour but interchangeable here; it thickens lightly and will not go gluey.
- Curry-powder and curry-pasteBoth were available as commercial shop-bought products in this period, and the recipe most likely assumes a mild blend. A tablespoon each of a modern madras powder and a jarred curry paste is roughly equivalent, but taste the sauce before the meat goes in — modern pastes are considerably more assertive and saltier.
- Bloom the spiceThe powder is mixed straight into the pulp, which leaves it raw-tasting. Stirring it into the hot onion mixture for a minute over the heat before the stock goes in makes a noticeable difference.
- The simmerOnce the pork returns to the pan it should barely tremble. A rolling boil for 45 minutes will tighten the meat and split the sauce. The final quick boil after lifting the meat out is a reduction step — two or three minutes only.
- YieldThree or four as written, with plain long-grain or basmati rice served separately, as the original directs.
Curry had been part of the English domestic repertoire for over a century by the time Cassell's appeared, arriving with returning East India Company families and settling into a distinctly British form: commercial curry powder, a sweet onion-and-apple base, and a squeeze of thickener. The apple points the same way — it is a hallmark of the Victorian kitchen's habit of rounding out spice with sweetness rather than of any Indian practice. Pork is another marker of domestication, since the dish would be avoided by observant Muslim and, in many households, Hindu cooks in India itself; here it is simply a cheap and available meat at tenpence the pound.