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Sardines, Curried
Put an ounce of butter in a clean stewpan; when hot add a large sliced onion, a large apple, peeled, cored, and sliced, and a dessert-spoonful of desiccated cocoa-nut. Fry for a few minutes, stirring occasionally, as neither the onion nor the apple should be allowed to burn. Add sufficient salt, dredge in by degrees a table-spoonful of curry-powder, add a gill of good stock, and let it simmer slowly for fifteen minutes, taking care that it does not burn. Thicken with a little flour and butter kneaded together, add a tea-spoonful of sugar and a dessert-spoonful of vinegar, and cook for another ten or fifteen minutes. Take the sardines and drain them carefully to free them from oil, add them to the curry sauce, heat up, and dish up neatly with a border of well-boiled rice.
A late-Victorian tinned-fish curry: the sauce is made first and the sardines are only warmed through at the end. Keep that order.
- Add the sardines last, off the boilTinned sardines are already cooked and very soft. Fold them in, let them heat for two or three minutes without stirring hard, or they will break up into shreds.
- A gillA quarter of an imperial pint: about 5 fl oz, roughly 140 ml, a generous half cup. That is a small amount of stock, so the sauce should be thick and clinging rather than pourable.
- Spoon measuresA Victorian dessert-spoon is roughly two teaspoons; a tablespoon of the period is close to the modern one. A full tablespoon of curry powder over half a cup of stock is assertive — start with two teaspoons if your powder is fresh and strong.
- Desiccated cocoa-nutUnsweetened desiccated coconut, sold plain in the baking aisle. Sweetened flaked coconut will throw the sugar balance off; if that is all you have, drop the teaspoon of sugar.
- Curry powder needs fryingDredging it into the hot butter and onion, rather than adding it with the stock, is the point of the method. Thirty to sixty seconds in the fat takes the raw dustiness out of the spice.
- Kneaded butter and flourThis is beurre manié — equal weights soft butter and flour worked to a paste, whisked in a pinch at a time. Roughly two teaspoons each is enough for this quantity.
- Draining the oilTip the tin out onto kitchen paper and blot. Sardine oil is heavily flavoured and will separate out of the sauce in a slick if it goes in.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many sardines; a tin or two suits this quantity of sauce, giving two servings, or three with a generous rice border. The scale suits a supper or breakfast dish rather than a dinner course.
Curried tinned fish belongs to the thrifty end of Anglo-Indian cookery, where a bought curry powder, an onion, an apple and a spoonful of coconut stood in for a spice paste ground at home. The apple-and-sugar-and-vinegar trio is the British house style of the period rather than anything Indian: sweetness and acid were added to round out commercial curry powder, which was usually turmeric-heavy and short on aromatics. Sardines packed in oil had become cheap and ubiquitous in Britain by the second half of the nineteenth century, largely from Brittany and later Portugal and Spain, which is why a general dictionary of cookery like Cassell's can assume a tin in the cupboard and build a hot dish around it. Dishes of this shape — spiced sauce, a border of boiled rice, small quantities — were also standard breakfast and luncheon fare in households that ate a cooked breakfast, alongside kedgeree and devilled kidneys.