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Curry Powder
Ingredients.
One pound and a half of Papaver Somniferum.
Two pounds of Turmeric (Powder).
Two ounces of Yellow Mustard Seed.
One ounce of Cinnamon.
Quarter of a pound of Garlic.
A little Lemon-juice.
Five pounds of Coriander Seed.
Quarter of a pound of large Chillies.
Two ounces of Black Pepper.
Grind all these up together in a spice mill, then rub them through a hair-sieve. I have given half the quantities the native gave me, they can be decreased in proportion as required. It is best to make small quantities. Be sure to get the turmeric powdered. I broke several machines trying to grind it; the rest of the ingredients are easy enough. The ingredients can be had of any large wholesale druggist. Get the large chillies, the little ones are so terribly hot. When we do not make our own curry powder, we always use Edmund's; also his curry paste and chutneys.
Brown Curry (Beef).
Ingredients.
Two pounds of Beef.
Two ounces of Butter.
This is a bulk druggist's formula rather than a kitchen one, and its first ingredient is named by botanical species rather than by the part used, which is where it comes unstuck.
- The first ingredient is not identified by partPapaver somniferum is the opium poppy. The ripe seed is an ordinary food and a genuine ingredient in Indian masalas, but the capsule, the straw and the latex are not: they carry morphine and codeine, and poppy-head preparations were a standard druggist's line when this book was written. A recipe that sends you to a wholesale druggist for a pound and a half of a species, without saying "seed", does not tell you what is in the jar.
- Why the sourcing mattersPoppy capsules and poppy straw are controlled substances in many countries and are not sold as food; where dried poppy heads are sold for decoration they are still not a food ingredient. Teas and infusions made from poppy heads or straw have caused fatal opioid poisoning, with no way to judge dose from the plant material. Use a current curry powder recipe that specifies white poppy seed by name, or buy a blend.
- ScaleEven halved from what the author was given, this comes to a little over nine pounds of powder. Her own advice to make small quantities is the sound part: ground spice loses its volatiles within a few months, and a blend of this size would be stale long before it was used.
- The turmeric problemDried turmeric rhizome is woody and dense, and she is right that domestic mills break on it. It is why she insists on buying it ready-powdered, and it remains the one spice in the list worth buying ground rather than whole.
- Hair sieveA fine sieve woven from horsehair, used before wire mesh was cheap. A fine-mesh drum sieve or a tamis does the same job of catching husk and unground fragments.
- "Large chillies"The distinction she draws still holds: large pods, such as the mild Kashmiri type, give colour and body at relatively low heat, while small chillies of the same weight would make the blend far hotter. Weight is a poor guide to pungency in chilli.
- Edmund'sEvidently a commercial curry powder, paste and chutney brand of the period. The aside shows that ready-made curry powder and paste were readily available, and used even in a household that sometimes blended its own.
Curry powder as a single pre-mixed, all-purpose blend sold by grocers and druggists is largely a British commercial development; cooks in India more usually ground fresh masala for a given dish, though prepared spice mixtures were not unknown. This recipe sits at the join between the two habits. The author says a "native" gave her the proportions, and the heavy weighting toward coriander seed, with turmeric second, is consistent with South Asian practice; the halving, the spice mill, the hair sieve and the fallback on a branded tin are British. The Brown Curry (Beef) that begins on the same page is the next use of the same powder.