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Vegetable Curry
A mixture of vegetables may be used for curry. The most suitable are celery, onions, cauliflowers, young cabbages, cucumbers, green peas, French beans, spinach, and sorrel. Mince or slice the vegetables. Dissolve a slice of fresh butter in a stewpan; roll the vegetables in curry-powder, and toss them in the butter till they are half cooked. Pour over them as much cream, or gravy mixed smoothly with curry-powder or paste, as will cover them, and stew till tender. Add a little salt, and serve with rice boiled for curry on a separate dish. A table-spoonful of lemon-juice is generally considered an improvement to this dish. If liked, a small quantity of mashed potatoes or fried onions and an apple rubbed through a sieve may be added to the curry sauce. Shrimps or prawns may also be added if approved. Time altogether, about an hour.
A template rather than a fixed formula: Cassell's gives no quantities and no oven, so the cook supplies the proportions. The one thing to fix is the timing, since the vegetables listed cook at wildly different rates.
- Working quantitiesFor about 2 lb of prepared vegetables, allow 2 oz butter, 1 to 2 tablespoons curry powder, and roughly 3/4 to 1 cup cream or gravy. "A slice of fresh butter" is not a fixed measure; it suggests a cut off the block, and 1 to 2 oz is a reasonable working reading.
- Stagger the vegetablesThe recipe gives only "about an hour" altogether. Take that as the span for the firmer vegetables, celery, onion and cauliflower; peas, French beans, cucumber, spinach and sorrel go in for the last few minutes only, spinach and sorrel for barely two, or they will collapse into the sauce.
- Bloom the powder, do not scorch itRolling the vegetables in dry curry powder and tossing them in butter is the hinge of the dish, and the point where it fails. Keep the heat moderate: curry powder holds turmeric and ground coriander, which turn bitter and dusty over high heat in a few seconds.
- Cream will not take a hard boilOnce the cream goes in, hold the pan at a bare simmer. The lemon juice is acidic enough that a rolling boil risks a split, grainy sauce. If you use gravy instead, meat stock, thickened or not, is the likeliest reading.
- Lemon juice at the endAdd the tablespoon of lemon juice off the heat, just before serving. Added early it dulls in cooking and works against the cream.
- Apple rubbed through a sieveThis is unsweetened apple sauce: cook a peeled, cored apple in a spoonful of water until soft and press it through a sieve. Two or three tablespoons is enough to round the sauce without making it a sweet dish.
- If you add shrimpsCooked peeled shrimp or prawns need two minutes in the finished sauce, no more. Stirring them in at the start of the stew gives rubber.
- Rice boiled for curryPlain rice, boiled in plenty of water and drained dry, served separately rather than under the curry, as the recipe directs. Victorian curry rice was typically a long grain such as Patna.
- YieldTwo pounds of vegetables cooked this way serves four as a main dish with rice, six as part of a larger meal.
By the late nineteenth century curry had been thoroughly naturalised in the British kitchen: it had become a method for using up what was in the garden, applied to sorrel and young cabbage as readily as to mutton. Commercial curry powder, sold in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, is what made that possible, standing in for the freshly ground spice mixtures of the subcontinent and reducing the whole business to a tin on the shelf. The optional additions here — sieved apple, mashed potato, fried onion, cream, lemon juice — are the signature of the Anglo-Indian style, sweetened and thickened well beyond anything that would be recognised in the cuisines it borrowed from. The inclusion of shrimps "if approved" is a reminder that these books were written for households where the cook decided what the dish became.