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Chicken Curry
3 lb. chicken 1/3 cup butter 2 onions 1 tablespoon curry powder 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon vinegar Clean, dress, and cut chicken in pieces for serving. Put butter in a hot frying-pan, add chicken, and cook ten minutes; then add liver and gizzard and cook ten minutes longer. Cut onions in thin slices, and add to chicken with curry powder and salt. Add enough boiling water to cover, and simmer until chicken is tender. Remove chicken; strain, and thicken liquor with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Pour gravy over chicken, and serve with a border of rice or Turkish Pilaf.
A plain braise rather than an Indian curry, and it works well if you treat the frying stage as a proper browning and the curry powder as something to be bloomed in fat rather than boiled in water.
- Bloom the powderThe recipe does add the curry powder with the onions, before the boiling water goes in, but gives it no time in the fat. Let the powder and onions sit in the hot butter for a minute before the liquid goes in; the flavour changes completely.
- The vinegarA teaspoon of vinegar is listed but never mentioned in the method. Add it at the end, off the heat, where it will lift the gravy. It is not enough to affect the braise if stirred in earlier.
- Twenty minutes of fryingTen minutes for the chicken and ten more after the giblets go in assumes a moderate heat and frequent turning. Work in batches so the pieces brown rather than steam, and expect closer to 8-10 minutes total over medium-high heat in a modern heavy pan.
- GibletsLiver and gizzard were assumed to come with the bird. If yours did not, the dish is fine without them; the liver in particular will break down and slightly thicken the sauce.
- Simmering timeA 3 lb chicken cut for serving needs roughly 30-40 minutes at a bare simmer, with the breast pieces lifted out earlier than the thighs and drumsticks.
- Thickening the liquor"Flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily" is a flour-and-water slurry; reckon on 2 tablespoons flour to about 1/4 cup cold water for the quantity of liquid here. Whisk it into the boiling strained liquid and cook two or three minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- Butter quantityA third of a cup is about 5 tablespoons, generous for browning chicken. Pour off some of the fat before adding the water if the finished gravy looks greasy.
- YieldProbably serves four with rice. Turkish Pilaf appears elsewhere in the book; plain long-grain rice does the same job.
Curry entered American and English cookery through the British colonial kitchen, and by the turn of the twentieth century it had settled into a domestic formula: commercial curry powder, onions, a braise, a flour-thickened gravy and a ring of rice. Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking School tradition, from which this book's style descends, treated curry powder as a single seasoning to be measured by the spoon rather than a blend to be ground at home, and the result is a mild stew that owes more to the fricassee than to anything on the subcontinent. The instruction to "clean, dress, and cut" the chicken is a reminder that a bird still arrived whole and undrawn; the giblets were part of the purchase and were expected to go into the pot.