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Curried Tomatoes with Rice
Boil 1 cupful of rice until tender and dry. While this is cooking, scald and peel 4 or 5 medium-sized tomatoes. Cut them in halves across and take out the seeds; then cut each of these halves in two. Chop 2 small onions very fine, cook them in a saucepan with 2 tablespoonfuls of butter until tender; add 1 teaspoonful of curry powder, 1 bay leaf, 1 blade of mace, and 1 cupful of hot water. Let this mixture boil, then put in the tomatoes, cover closely and simmer twenty minutes, or until the tomatoes are tender, but not broken. Dish the rice in a mound on a deep hot platter or shallow vegetable dish; place the tomatoes carefully around the edge of the dish, strain the sauce over all and serve at once.
A simple curried vegetable dish built around a short braise rather than a long-cooked sauce. The main thing to manage is keeping the tomato pieces intact.
- The hinge: don't stirOnce the tomatoes go into the sauce, leave them alone. Cover and let the steam do the work, shaking the pan gently if anything looks like sticking; a spoon will break the quarters and turn the dish into a sauce.
- Simmer timeTwenty minutes suits firm, underripe tomatoes. Modern ripe fruit collapses much sooner — start checking at eight to ten minutes and pull them the moment a knife tip slides in easily.
- Blade of maceA blade is one flattened piece of the lacy aril from around a nutmeg, roughly a large pinch. If you only have ground mace, use a scant 1/8 teaspoon and accept that you cannot fish it out later.
- Curry powderA single teaspoon reads as a light seasoning here rather than a heat level, and ready-blended powders of the period were generally milder than a modern hot Madras. Taste before committing to more.
- Bloom the spiceAdd the curry powder to the buttery onions and let it cook thirty seconds before the water goes in. Raw powder stirred into liquid keeps a chalky edge.
- Rice"Tender and dry" means separate grains, not sticky — long-grain, drained and left uncovered a few minutes to steam off. About 1 cup raw gives 3 cups cooked.
- Straining the sauceStraining removes the bay, mace and onion, leaving a thin, clear, buttery liquid. If you would rather have body, lift out the whole spices and leave the onion in.
- YieldServes three to four as a vegetable course, or two as a light main. It does not reheat well; the tomatoes go to pieces.
Curry powder was thoroughly domesticated in British and American kitchens by the time this book was compiled — sold ready-blended, kept in the spice cupboard alongside mace and bay, and used as one seasoning among several rather than as the basis of an Indian dish. The combination here is telling: bay leaf and a blade of mace are familiar European aromatics of the nineteenth-century white sauce, and the curry powder is dropped in beside them. Tomatoes had by then moved from suspicion to staple in American cookery, and vegetable chapters of the period are full of them scalded, peeled, seeded and stewed. Ringing a vegetable around a mound of rice was one way to give a meatless dish enough presence for the dinner table.