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PRAWNS, CURRIED (another way)
Mince an onion finely, and steam it in a little butter until it is quite soft. Rub it through a fine sieve, and mix with the pulp a table-spoonful of the rasped meat of a cocoa-nut, and a table-spoonful of curry-paste or powder--paste is much the better of the two. Add gradually a pint of good broth and half a stick of cinnamon, and let the sauce simmer for a quarter of an hour. Put in a pound of prawns weighed after they have been shelled, and let them simmer for a few minutes. About ten minutes before the curry is taken from the fire, mix a tea-spoonful of flour smoothly with the cocoanut milk, and add it to the sauce. Stir gently over the fire for five minutes, squeeze the juice of a lemon into the curry, and serve very hot. Send boiled rice to table on a separate dish. Time, one hour. Probable cost, prawns, variable. Sufficient for five or six persons. (See also PRAWNS, MALAY CURRY OF.)
A late-Victorian Anglo-Indian curry that is sound in outline, but the timings need reading against each other before you start.
- The prawns go in lastAs written, the prawns simmer "a few minutes" and then sit through the final ten minutes, during which the flour mixture goes in and the sauce is stirred for five. Shelled prawns need two to three minutes in barely simmering sauce; build and thicken the sauce first, then add them at the very end and take the pan off the heat as soon as they turn opaque.
- Quantities of prawnA pound weighed after shelling is about 450 g of ready-peeled meat, or roughly 2 lb (900 g) of head-on prawns; rather less if they are headless shell-on. Raw prawns are better here than pre-cooked, which will only toughen.
- Rasped cocoa-nut and cocoa-nut milkA tablespoon of grated fresh coconut flesh goes into the sauce, and "cocoanut milk" is called for later to slake the flour, though the recipe does not say where it comes from: in period usage the term can mean either the liquid inside the nut or the milk pressed from grated flesh. A few tablespoons of canned coconut milk will do the job of both, and unsweetened desiccated coconut can stand in for the rasped flesh.
- A pint of brothThis is an imperial pint, 20 fl oz or 570 ml. Use a light chicken or fish stock; a prawn-shell stock made from the shells you have just removed is better than anything you will buy.
- Curry-paste versus powderThe recipe's preference for paste is easy to understand: ground curry powder loses its aroma on the shelf, while a paste carries oil and aromatics that keep better. A modern mild curry paste works; if using powder, fry it in the butter with the onion for a minute so the spices lose their raw edge.
- Sieving the onionSteaming minced onion in butter until soft and pushing it through a sieve is the period route to a smooth sauce. A short blast with a stick blender achieves the same thing in seconds.
- The cinnamonHalf a stick of cassia or cinnamon steeps in the sauce for the fifteen-minute simmer. Fish it out before serving.
- Yield and servingFive or six as part of a larger meal; three or four as a main course with the boiled rice, which the recipe rightly sends to table separately. The lemon goes in off the heat, at the last moment.
Curried prawns of this kind belong to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that had become thoroughly domesticated in British kitchens by the time Cassell's dictionary appeared in the later nineteenth century — a curry built on a broth base, thickened with a little flour, soured with lemon and served with rice on a separate dish, a practice often described as an English convention, though separate rice is common in India too. The insistence that paste is "much the better of the two" is generally taken to reflect the market of the period: commercial curry powders were widely sold, and pastes, several of them made by firms trading on Indian connections, were said to keep their aromatics better. Fresh coconut was a shipped luxury of uncertain availability in Victorian towns, and its appearance here alongside cinnamon marks this as one of the milder, sweeter styles of curry the period favoured. The cross-reference to a "Malay curry of prawns" may suggest that Victorian cookbooks used regional labels loosely, as flavour signals rather than geography.