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Veal Curry, Made with Cold Cooked Veal
Take about two pounds of cold cooked veal, and cut it into neat pieces about a quarter of an inch thick. Slice four onions and one apple, and fry them in fat, turning them about till they are soft. Rub them through a sieve, and mix with the pulp a table-spoonful of curry-paste or curry-powder, a dessert-spoonful of ground rice, a pinch of salt, and a little stock or water. Boil the sauce till it is smooth, put in the pieces of veal, draw the pan back, and simmer the meat gently in the sauce for about half an hour. Dish the curry neatly, and send rice boiled for curry to table on a separate dish. Time, about three-quarters of an hour. Probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat. Sufficient for four or five persons.
A Victorian way of using up the Sunday joint: the sauce is built from onion and apple pulp rather than flour, which gives it body without pastiness. The one thing to change is the timing.
- Cut the simmering shortThe veal is already cooked, so half an hour in the sauce will only dry and string it. Ten minutes at a bare simmer is enough to heat the meat through and let it take up the sauce.
- "Draw the pan back"On a coal range this meant sliding the pan off the hot plate to the cooler edge. On a modern hob, drop the heat until the surface barely moves; a rolling boil will toughen the meat and split the sauce.
- Ground riceGround rice is finely milled rice, coarser than rice flour but interchangeable here. A dessert-spoonful is about 2 teaspoons, and it thickens as it boils, so give the sauce a few minutes before judging its consistency.
- Sieving the pulpRubbing four fried onions and an apple through a sieve is the slow way to a smooth base. A blender or stick blender does the same job in seconds; fry the onions until genuinely soft and lightly coloured first, or the sauce tastes raw and sharp.
- Bloom the curry powderThe instruction mixes the powder straight into the pulp. Frying it in the fat for a half minute before the liquid goes in cooks off the raw spice notes and makes a marked difference to the finished sauce.
- "A little stock or water"Genuinely unspecified. Start with about 150 ml for 2 lb of meat and add more as it thickens; you want a sauce that coats the veal rather than a soup.
- Apple and saltA cooking apple such as Bramley collapses to pulp and adds the tartness the dish depends on; an eating apple stays sweet and firmer. Salt at the end, since a reduced stock can carry plenty already.
- Serving"Rice boiled for curry" is a cross-reference to a separate entry; the aim in such recipes is plain boiled rice with the grains separate and dry, served in its own dish. The stated yield of four or five is realistic for 2 lb of meat.
Curry reached British domestic cookery largely through the East India Company connection, and by the later nineteenth century it had become, among other things, a respectable way of dealing with leftovers: cold mutton, veal, rabbit or fowl reappeared on Monday under a curry sauce. Commercial curry powders and pastes were on sale well before this book appeared, which may be why Cassell's offers them as interchangeable without further comment on their contents. The onion-and-apple base, sieved to a pulp and bound with a spoonful of ground rice, is characteristic of the Anglo-Indian style of the period, generally sweeter and milder than its Indian models, and the note of "probable cost, 6d., exclusive of the cold meat" suggests the audience the book was written for: a household keeping accounts and unwilling to waste a joint.