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Potatoes, Curried
Chop and fry a good-sized onion in a little butter until it becomes a pale yellow. Add half a pint of milk and plain stock mixed, and two table-spoonfuls of rice flour. Boil up and simmer till the onion is done. Cut some cold potatoes into dice, add them to the above with a tea-spoonful of curry powder, salt, and a little lemon-juice. Serve as soon as hot through, and impregnated with the curry flavour.
A frugal Victorian way with leftover boiled potatoes: a thin curried sauce thickened with rice flour, with the potatoes warmed through rather than cooked in it. The whole thing takes about twenty minutes.
- Fry the curry powder, not just the potatoesCassell's adds the curry powder at the end, which leaves raw, dusty spice. Stir the teaspoon of powder into the softened onion and butter for a minute before the liquid goes in, then correct the seasoning at the end. This is the single change that decides whether the dish tastes finished.
- Half a pintAn imperial half-pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. Split it roughly evenly between milk and unsalted stock. The sauce is meant to be loose enough to coat, not a gravy.
- Rice flourStill sold, usually in the baking or gluten-free aisle; it thickens to a slightly grainier, less glossy sauce than wheat flour. Slake the two tablespoons in a little cold milk before adding, or it will lump. Cornflour at half the quantity is the nearest substitute.
- "Plain stock"Unseasoned and unsalted, in period terms — a light veal or chicken stock, or the water from boiling vegetables. Modern cubes and cartons are salty enough to throw the seasoning off, so dilute them and salt at the end.
- Simmer till the onion is doneTen to twelve minutes on a low flame, stirring so the milk does not catch. Chop the onion finely at the outset and it will be soft in that time; the sauce is not strained, so any coarse pieces stay in the dish.
- Cold potatoesFirm, waxy boiled potatoes hold their dice; floury ones collapse into the sauce. They only need three or four minutes to heat through — longer and they break up.
- Lemon juiceAdd it off the heat, a teaspoon or so, tasting as you go. Acid poured into simmering milk risks curdling, and its job here is to lift the curry powder rather than to be tasted on its own.
- YieldAbout 1 lb of cooked potatoes suits this quantity of sauce, serving four as a side dish or two as a supper with rice or bread.
Curried potatoes belong to the long domestication of Indian flavours in British home cooking, by which point curry powder was a commercial blend sold by grocers and used much as one might use any other seasoning. Cassell's treats it accordingly: a teaspoonful stirred into a milk-and-stock sauce, with no whole spices, no ghee and no chilli. The dish is really a curried version of the standard Victorian reheat, in which yesterday's cold potatoes were rescued with a white sauce \— the same logic that produced potatoes à la maître d'hôtel. Rice flour as the thickener is a period marker too; it was recommended for sauces meant to be light, and it appears throughout nineteenth-century books in places where a modern cook would reach for a wheat-flour roux.