Home › The Principles of Cookery › Pumpkin Curry
Pumpkin Curry
Cut one pound of ripe pumpkin into neat slices about four inches long and an inch and a half wide; remove the rind and seeds. Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan, place it on the fire, and when it boils, add about one ounce of sliced onions, and fry to a nice brown. Add a table-spoonful of curry-powder, and fry for three or four minutes, stirring well. Add about a quarter of a pint of hot water or a little less, and a tea-spoonful of salt. Let this boil, then put in the sliced pumpkin and another ounce of sliced onions. Cover the saucepan, and simmer the curry gently for an hour, or until the pumpkin is quite tender, being careful not to break the pieces.
A plain Anglo-Indian vegetable curry of the sort British cookbooks printed by the hundred. It works, but two things need adjusting: the timing and the assumption about what curry powder is.
- The hinge: fry the powder, don't scorch itThe three or four minutes of frying the curry powder in butter is the step that makes the dish. Keep the heat moderate and stir constantly; ground spice in hot fat turns bitter in seconds, and once it does nothing later in the recipe will cover it.
- A quarter of a pintFive imperial fluid ounces, or a shade over half a US cup. With the lid on and a watery vegetable, that is ample; the pumpkin releases a good deal of its own liquid.
- An hour is too longAn hour of simmering will reduce most modern pumpkin or winter squash to purée, which defeats the instruction not to break the pieces. Start checking at 20 minutes; 25 to 35 is usually enough for firm-fleshed squash cut to this size.
- Which pumpkin'Ripe pumpkin' here probably implies a denser-fleshed pumpkin than the large carving type sold now, which is watery and stringy. Butternut, kabocha or crown prince all hold their shape better in a long simmer.
- Curry powderNineteenth-century commercial blends leaned heavily on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, with modest chilli. A tablespoon of a hot modern blend will give a much fiercer dish than the book expects; taste yours and scale accordingly.
- SaltA teaspoonful into a pound of vegetables and a quarter of a pint of water is on the generous side. Add half, then correct at the end.
- Yield and servingA pound of pumpkin serves two as a light main with rice, or three or four as one dish among several. It benefits from a squeeze of lemon or lime at the table, which the original does not mention.
Curry entered British domestic cookery well before Cassell's, arriving with returning East India Company families and settling into the repertoire as a way of using up cold meat or, as here, a cheap vegetable. By the time this dictionary was compiled, curry powder was a shop-bought commodity rather than a spice mixture ground at home, which is why the recipe treats a tablespoonful of it as a single fixed ingredient rather than a list. The method itself, frying onion and spice in fat before adding liquid and the main ingredient, is a reasonably faithful reduction of Indian technique, even if the hour-long simmer is thoroughly English. Pumpkin curries are common across South Asia, and the vegetable's cheapness and long keeping made it an autumn resource in British kitchens too, often destined for pie or soup; a curry gave it somewhere else to go.