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Cocoanut Curry
In India cocoanut is very much used in curries. For a vegetable curry melt two tablespoons of butter in a saucepan (or use cookng oil); slice into this one onion and let it cook for a few moments. Now add one tablespoonful of curry powder mixed with a half pint of cocoanut milk and a scant teaspoon of salt, and let simmer for five minutes. The vegetables should have been prepared beforehand, cooked separately: (cut in small bits): two carrots; two medium-sized Irish potatoes; one-half pint of green peas, and one-half pint of grated cocoanut. Place these in the curry and let simmer for about five minutes, when it is ready to serve.
A straightforward vegetable curry that assumes you have a fresh coconut on the counter and know what to do with it. Two things need translating: the measures, and what the author means by coconut milk.
- Coconut milk, 1900s senseIn books of this period coconut milk usually means the liquid pressed from grated coconut flesh steeped in hot water, not the thin water inside the nut and not the thick canned product. Full-fat canned coconut milk thinned with a little water gives roughly the right body; a 14 oz tin is more than the half pint called for, so you will use only part of it.
- Half a pintOne cup, in both the coconut milk and the peas. The half pint of grated coconut is a loose volume measure of roughly 2 1/2 to 3 oz of freshly grated flesh; unsweetened desiccated coconut works, sweetened flaked does not.
- Irish potatoesOrdinary white potatoes. The term distinguished them from sweet potatoes, which were simply "potatoes" in much of the American South at the time.
- Bloom the curry powderThe hinge of the dish. The powder is stirred into the coconut milk rather than the hot butter, so give the mixture the full five minutes at a bare simmer to cook out the raw, dusty edge of the spice blend. Frying the powder briefly with the onion before the liquid goes in improves it further.
- Keep it below a boilCoconut milk splits and turns grainy if held at a rolling boil. A lazy simmer for both five-minute stages is what is wanted.
- Vegetables cooked separatelyThey go in already tender and only warm through, so cook them to the point you want to eat them. Carrots and potatoes cut into half-inch dice, peas barely blanched.
- Salt and finishA scant teaspoon is modest for four cups of vegetables and a cup of coconut milk; taste at the end. A squeeze of lime or lemon sharpens the whole thing, which otherwise reads sweet and soft.
- YieldServes three or four over rice, or two as a main dish. Plain boiled long-grain rice is the assumed accompaniment even though the recipe does not say so.
Coconut curries reached English and American cookbooks by way of the British in India, and the opening line here — "In India cocoanut is very much used in curries" — is doing the work of an entire cuisine's introduction in nine words. Commercial curry powder, generally traced to British efforts to compress the varied spice blends of the subcontinent into a single tin, is what made recipes like this possible in a Western kitchen; by the time this book was printed it could be bought ready-made. The dish belongs to a fruit collection because the coconut is the point: whole coconuts travelled well and were widely available in American markets from the late nineteenth century onward, and cookbooks of the era worked hard to find uses for them beyond cake and candy. The older spelling "cocoanut", standard for most of the nineteenth century, is often said to reflect a long-running confusion with cacao, and it lingered in print long after.