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Rice, Curried
Slice an onion, fry it in hot fat till soft, and rub it through a sieve. Mix smoothly with the pulp a table-spoonful of curry-powder, a table-spoonful of curry-paste, an ounce of butter, three table-spoonfuls of cream, and a little salt. Have ready half a pound of rice boiled as for curry. Put this into a saucepan with the prepared paste. Mix thoroughly and lightly, and serve very hot, piled high on a dish. In mixing the rice be careful to toss it lightly with two forks; to use a spoon would crush it. Macaroni may be curried in the same way. Time, eight or ten minutes to mix and beat the rice. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for five or six persons.
A side dish rather than a curry proper: plain boiled rice folded through a rich onion-and-curry paste. The whole thing stands or falls on the rice being dry and separate before it meets the paste.
- "Boiled as for curry"Victorian cookery books generally directed that rice be boiled in plenty of salted water like pasta, drained hard, and the grains dried off in a warm place until they stood apart. Rice cooked by absorption in a covered pan is likely to be too moist and to turn pasty when you fold in the butter and cream.
- QuantitiesHalf a pound of rice is about 1 1/8 cups dry, giving roughly 3 to 4 cups cooked, ample for the five or six servings claimed. An ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons; the recipe does not say which cream, so a single or light cream is a reasonable reading.
- Curry-paste versus curry-powderThe recipe calls for both dry curry powder and a curry paste, the latter a jarred oil-and-vinegar preparation of a kind sold by Victorian grocers, though such things were also made at home. Using the two together was common. A modern Madras curry paste stands in for the second; if you use only powder, fry it in the butter first or it will taste raw and dusty.
- Sieving the onionFrying the onion soft and pushing it through a sieve gives a smooth pulp with no visible pieces. A small blender or a few minutes' mashing with a fork does the same job. Cook the onion gently until genuinely soft and sweet; browned onion sieves badly and tastes bitter under the spice.
- Two forks, not a spoonThe instruction that matters. Lift and toss the rice with two forks rather than stirring; pressure on hot cooked grains ruptures them and releases starch, and the dish goes gluey.
- Heat and timingThe eight to ten minutes is folding and warming through over low heat, not cooking. Have the rice already hot if you can, so the pan time stays short.
- The macaroni variantBoiled macaroni treated the same way works, but drain it well and toss with a little of the butter first so the paste coats rather than clumps.
Cassell's is writing at the height of Anglo-Indian cookery in Britain, when curry powder and bottled curry paste were staples of the middle-class store cupboard, sold ready-blended by grocers and treated as a single flavouring rather than a spice mixture to be built from scratch. Curried rice of this kind is not an Indian dish so much as a British one built from Indian materials: rice, which the Victorian kitchen otherwise served plain as an accompaniment or boiled into pudding, given the same commercial curry treatment applied to cold meat, eggs and lobster. The costing of ninepence for five or six people marks it as thrift cookery, a way of dressing up a cheap staple for the table.