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Vegetables, Curry Of
Take half a pound of French beans, one onion, and one apple, all cut small, two ounces of chopped ham, one chilli cut small, one table-spoonful of curry-powder, a quarter of a pint of cocoa-nut milk, and two cardamoms. Put all together into a stewpan, and cook slowly for an hour. When ready to serve, thicken with a little grated cocoa-nut and milk.
A small vegetable curry from the era when curry powder was a single tin-bought blend. The proportions work, but the hour of slow cooking is aimed at a coal range and a different idea of what a bean should be.
- The hour is the problemFrench beans held at a simmer for an hour turn olive-drab and collapse. The onion, apple and ham benefit from a long slow cook; the beans need eight to ten minutes. Build the base first and add the beans near the end.
- Quarter of a pintFive fluid ounces in British measure, about 150 ml or two-thirds of a cup. Half a pound of beans is roughly 225 g, trimmed and cut into short lengths.
- Coconut milk, 1890s senseCoconut milk, Victorian sense — This means grated coconut steeped in hot milk or water and strained, not the thick tinned product. Canned coconut milk is considerably richer, so thin it or expect a heavier sauce than intended.
- The final thickening"Grated cocoa-nut and milk" most likely means a second, stronger infusion stirred in to finish; the recipe does not say to take the pan off the heat, but hard boiling afterwards can make the coconut fat separate and the sauce look broken.
- CardamomsTwo whole pods; the recipe does not say which kind. Bruise them so they release their oil and fish them out before serving. Not two teaspoons of ground cardamom, which would swamp the dish.
- No fat is specifiedBeyond what the coconut milk carries, the two ounces of chopped ham is the only fat in the pan. Curry powder tastes raw and dusty unless it is fried briefly in some fat with the onion before the liquid goes in, so render the ham first and bloom the powder in it.
- The chilliOne chilli, kind unspecified; if fresh, seeds and all in a dish this size. Commercial curry powders of the period were generally milder than many modern blends, so judge the heat against whatever blend you are using.
- YieldEnough for two as a light main dish or three or four alongside rice and something else. It is a side dish in scale.
Cassell's places this among a run of curries that reflect a very British-Indian idea of the form: a tin of curry powder, a chopped apple for sweetness, and whatever the kitchen had to hand — here French beans and the end of a ham. The apple is the tell. It is often said to have no place in Indian cooking and to appear in English curries from the mid-nineteenth century onward as a substitute for the tamarind, mango or other souring agents that were hard to buy in Britain, though this is a traditional explanation rather than a documented one. Coconut, by contrast, points to a genuine transmission of technique: extracting milk from grated coconut in successive infusions, thin first and thick to finish, is how it is done across South and Southeast Asia, and the method was known in Britain well before tinned coconut milk existed. That a vegetable curry appears at all is worth noting.