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VEGETABLES, CURRY OF (another way)
Take two carrots, two turnips, half a pint of green peas, two potatoes, one onion, an ounce and a half of butter, half a pint of stock, two table-spoonfuls of Empress curry-powder, one tea-spoonful of lemon-juice, one tea-spoonful of salt. Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the onion, sliced, and fry for a few minutes; then add the curry-powder and stock mixed together, the salt and the lemon-juice, and boil all together for about five minutes. Have ready the carrots, turnips, and potatoes cut into small pieces and boiled separately, and the peas nicely cooked. Put these vegetables into the curry, and warm them for about five minutes.
A quick composed curry rather than a slow-simmered one: the vegetables are cooked separately and only warmed through in the sauce at the end. That order is the point of the dish and worth keeping.
- Half a pintCassell's pints are imperial, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 1¼ US cups. That applies to both the stock and the measure of peas.
- Empress curry-powderEvidently a proprietary curry blend of the sort grocers sold under their own names in the nineteenth century; it is not available now. Any decent commercial madras-style curry powder stands in; two tablespoons for half a pint of stock is assertive, so start with one and a half if your blend is fresh and hot.
- Bloom the powder in the fatThe recipe mixes the powder into the stock, but raw curry powder tastes dusty. Stir it into the butter with the fried onion for 30-60 seconds until it smells toasted, then add the liquid.
- The sauce will be thinButter, stock and powder give a loose gravy with nothing to bind it. A teaspoon of flour added with the curry powder, or reducing the stock a little longer before the vegetables go in, gives something that coats rather than pools.
- Cook the roots to just doneThey get five more minutes in the sauce, so boil the carrots, turnips and potatoes until barely tender. Peas from frozen need only a minute or two and can go in with the rest.
- Lemon at the endBoiling the lemon juice for five minutes flattens it. Add half at the start for the sauce and the rest off the heat, tasting first.
- YieldServes three or four as a side, two as a main course with rice. Salt is generous at a full teaspoon if your stock is already seasoned.
Curry powder sold as a single jar of ready-mixed spice was largely a British commercial development, and by the later nineteenth century such blends were named outright in grocers' advertisements and in cookery books. Cassell's gives several curries, and this vegetable version reflects the way the dish had been absorbed into ordinary English household cooking: not a composed Indian preparation but a light stock-and-butter sauce used to dress vegetables boiled in the usual English manner. Plain boiled rice would be the expected accompaniment.