Curried Beef
Cut 3 onions into slices, and fry. Pour over them a little stock, and add a sliced sour apple and simmer until tender. Rub through a sieve, add a tablespoonful of rice, and 1 of curry-paste and enough stock to make a sauce. When it becomes smooth and thick, put in the dressed beef, which has been cut into thin slices. Simmer gently for a short time, and serve with boiled rice.
A Victorian re-heat dish: the point is to use up yesterday's roast, not to cook beef from raw. Everything hinges on adding the meat last and keeping it barely at a simmer.
- "Dressed beef"This means beef already cooked — cold roast or boiled beef, sliced thin. Raw beef will not work here; it needs long braising, and the sauce is finished before the meat goes in.
- Keep the meat briefCooked beef held long in a simmering sauce turns dry and stringy; the recipe says only "a short time." Bring the sauce to temperature, slide the slices in, hold below a boil until hot through, and serve.
- Curry pasteCommercial bottled pastes of the period were generally spice blends let down with oil or fat, often with vinegar and salt. A modern mild Madras or korma paste is the nearest thing; a tablespoon of dry curry powder can stand in, but fry it briefly with the onions rather than stirring it into the liquid raw.
- The sour appleA tart cooking apple such as a Bramley, which collapses to puree. Sweeter dessert apples tend to hold their shape and work against the sourness the recipe is after.
- Rice as thickenerThe tablespoon of rice appears to be doing the work of flour. If raw, it will need roughly twenty minutes at a simmer to soften enough to thicken; ground rice or a teaspoon of cornflour slaked in cold stock gives similar body faster.
- Rub through a sieveA blender or stick blender does this in seconds. Sieve afterwards if you want the smooth, uniform sauce the original intends.
- Stock quantityNone is given. Use just enough to keep the onions and apple from catching while they soften, then about 1 to 1 1/2 cups to build the sauce, judging by eye until it coats a spoon.
- YieldThree onions and a pound or so of sliced cold beef will serve three to four with boiled rice.
Curry entered British home cookery in the wake of the East India Company trade, and by the middle of the nineteenth century had settled into a domestic form quite unlike anything on the subcontinent: onion, sour apple, stock and a spoonful of bottled paste, poured over cold meat. Commercial curry powders were advertised in London by the late eighteenth century and pastes followed, which is why a compilation like this one can call for "1 of curry-paste" without explaining what goes into it. The apple supplies the fruity sourness that tamarind or unripe mango would give elsewhere, and it recurs often enough in English curry recipes to have survived into the twentieth century. Dishes of this kind seem to have been valued less as curries than as a way of bringing a Sunday joint back to the table later in the week.