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Curried Chicken
Four tablespoons of butter, two cups of rich milk, four tablespoons of flour, two cups of chicken meat, one tablespoon of curry powder, two hard-boiled eggs, one teaspoon of onion juice, salt and pepper. Melt butter, add flour and curry powder mixed, onion juice and milk, cook five minutes, add chicken and eggs and seasonings, cook until chicken is hot.
Turkey or lamb may be prepared in the same way.
This is a curry-flavored cream sauce built on cooked meat — closer to a creamed chicken than to an Indian curry — and it depends entirely on cooking the roux long enough that the flour and the curry powder both lose their raw edge.
- The hinge: cook the roux and spice togetherCurry powder is mostly toasted ground spice plus turmeric, and it tastes chalky if it only warms through in milk. Stir it into the butter and flour and let the paste bubble a full minute before any liquid goes in, then hold the finished sauce at a bare simmer for the stated five minutes.
- "Rich milk"Unskimmed milk, from a household that had cream on hand. Use whole milk, or replace half a cup of it with heavy cream for the texture the writer expected.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve to get roughly the teaspoon called for. Grated onion pulp works, though it leaves flecks in the sauce.
- Curry powderA tablespoon of a modern commercial blend is assertive but not hot. Period blends varied a good deal and were often milder, so taste and adjust rather than adding more on principle.
- The chicken is already cookedTwo cups means diced meat pulled from a roast or a stewed fowl. The final step only brings it up to temperature — extended simmering shreds it and turns breast meat dry.
- The eggsChop the hard-boiled eggs coarsely and fold them in at the very end. They break down into the sauce if stirred hard.
- Yield and servingRoughly four cups of finished mixture, enough for about four. Serve over steamed rice, in pastry shells, or on toast.
- Seasoning orderSalt last. The sauce reduces slightly and the curry powder itself may carry salt, so hold back until the chicken is hot.
Curry powder reached American home kitchens in the nineteenth century as a bottled British import, and by the time this book was compiled it sat on the grocer's shelf as one flavoring among many. That explains the shape of this recipe: it is a standard cream sauce — butter, flour, milk, with butter and flour in equal measure as the cooking schools taught — with curry powder folded in as a seasoning rather than as the foundation of the dish. The closing line, that turkey or lamb may be prepared the same way, suggests its real purpose: a way to make the remains of a roast into something that looks intentional.