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VINDALOO (an Indian dish)
Take four pounds of young fat pork, freshly killed, and not washed. If water be used in any form the meat will not keep. Cut it up into square pieces, of two inches or thereabouts, and rinse them in good vinegar. Rub each well over with curry-powder, steep them in good French vinegar to cover for twenty-four hours, with half a tea-spoonful of salt. Heat some good mustard oil in a copper pan; when it begins to smoke put in four table-spoonfuls of curry-powder, mixed into a paste with vinegar; add a heaped table-spoonful of pounded garlic, and the meat, with the vinegar in which it was steeped. Then put in salt to taste, a tea-spoonful of peppercorns, and four bay-leaves, and cook until the meat is quite tender. Set it by until cold, then put the meat in a perfectly-dry jar of earthenware. Pour in the oil in which it was cooked, to come an inch or two above the meat. Secure with a stopper and tie over with bladder.
This is not simply a curry but a method of preserving cooked pork in a sealed jar without refrigeration, and that is where it fails. The points below explain the specific problems rather than offering a corrected version; for pork vindaloo to eat, use a current recipe.
- Meat under oil, sealed and unrefrigeratedThe finished pork is packed into an earthenware jar, covered by an inch or two of oil and closed with a stopper and bladder, then kept at room temperature. Oil excludes air, and low-acid cooked meat held anaerobically at ambient temperature is the classic setting for Clostridium botulinum. Nothing in the method measures acidity, salt or storage temperature, and vinegar diluted through four pounds of meat and a panful of oil cannot be assumed to hold the pH below 4.6.
- Pounded garlic in the oilGarlic held in oil is a documented botulism vehicle in its own right, which is why commercial garlic-in-oil products are acidified and refrigerated. A heaped tablespoonful of it goes into the storage medium here.
- "Freshly killed, and not washed"The instruction reflects a period belief that surface moisture spoils keeping meat. It has no bearing on the pathogens that matter, and modern pork reaching a domestic kitchen has already been chilled and handled in ways this method assumes away.
- No temperature anywhere"Cook until the meat is quite tender" is the only doneness cue, and no processing step follows. A preserving recipe with no measured time, temperature or acidity cannot be validated, however long it was used successfully in practice.
- Bladder as a sealA pig or ox bladder, tied over the jar mouth, was one of the common airtight coverings before rubber rings and lacquered lids. It seals against air but sterilises nothing, and it is the reason the contents sit in exactly the anaerobic conditions that are the problem.
- Mustard oilMustard oil is the correct fat for this style of cooking in India and gives the dish its pungency. In the United States it is sold labelled for external use only, on account of its erucic acid content, and is not permitted as a cooking oil.
- Curry-powderA late-Victorian British curry powder, whether bought ready-made or mixed at home, leant on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, unlike the Goan masala of dried red chillies, cumin, cloves, cinnamon and black pepper that a vindaloo is built on. Four tablespoons of it, plus a rub for each piece, is the Anglo-Indian compromise.
Vindaloo comes from the Portuguese carne de vinha d'alhos, meat in wine and garlic, carried to Goa in the sixteenth century and reworked there with palm vinegar in place of wine and dried red chillies added to the garlic. The dish was portable and kept well, which is precisely the quality being recorded here: this is the preserved-in-a-jar form, the kind of thing sent up-country or carried on a journey, rather than a curry cooked for dinner. Its appearance in a British household dictionary of the period reflects how thoroughly returning Anglo-Indian families had pressed Indian dishes into the domestic repertoire, usually filtered through a shop-bought curry powder. The heat that the name now suggests in British curry houses is a much later development, and has little to do with the Goan original, where the defining note is sour rather than fiery.