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Kebob Curry
Ingredients.
Two pounds of Beef, Mutton, or Veal.
Two or three Onions.
Three or four pieces of Green Ginger.
Procure some small skewers about two and a half inches long. Peel the ginger and slice it, skin the onion and slice it rather thickly, and cut the meat into pieces about an inch and a half square. Thread the meat, ginger, and onion on the skewers, about two pieces of each alternately.
When the skewers are full proceed to make the curry by either of the recipes for meat curry given in this book, putting in the skewers in place of the pieces of meat.
This is a method rather than a standalone dish: it assumes you already have a meat curry recipe running and simply substitutes threaded skewers for loose cubes. A few practical notes.
- Skewer size and materialTwo and a half inches is very short, and the recipe still asks for "about two pieces of each alternately" — two of meat, two of ginger, two of onion — on that length, with the meat cut into inch-and-a-half squares. Use metal or soaked bamboo.
- Green gingerSimply fresh ginger root, as opposed to the dried or preserved ginger a Victorian kitchen also stocked. "Three or four pieces" is vague: it may mean three or four whole knobs rather than a single one, and the recipe asks only that the ginger be peeled and sliced.
- Cut of meat matters more than speciesThe recipe treats beef, mutton and veal as interchangeable, but braising times are not. Chuck or shin will want 1½–2 hours at a bare simmer; lamb shoulder about the same; veal shoulder rather less. Loin or leg cut into cubes will go dry and stringy in a long curry.
- Sear before threadingNot in the original, but worth doing. Browning the cubes loose in the pan and then threading them gives colour the gravy alone will not, since skewered meat sits packed together and steams rather than browns.
- Keep the onion thickThe instruction to slice onion "rather thickly" is worth following: thin slices disintegrate off the skewer during the braise and you lose the alternation of meat, ginger and onion.
- Don't crowd the panSkewers need to lie flat and fully covered by gravy. A wide sauté pan or shallow casserole works better than a tall stockpot, and the skewers should be turned once partway through.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat gives four to six servings with rice. Warn diners the skewers are in the sauce, or serve them lifted out onto the rice with the gravy poured over.
"Kebob" here is the older English spelling of kebab, from the Arabic and Persian term that travelled into Indian cookery through Mughal kitchens and back to Britain with the officials, soldiers and their cooks who served in India. What is striking is the treatment: a kebab is normally grilled or roasted over fire, but this Anglo-Indian version threads the meat and then simmers the whole skewer in curry gravy, keeping the form of the dish while abandoning its defining technique. That hybrid is typical of the Anglo-Indian curry chapter, where Indian names were attached to methods a British cook already understood; "curry" itself had become a catch-all for a spiced gravy made to a house recipe rather than any particular regional preparation. The cross-reference to "either of the recipes for meat curry given in this book" points the cook to two meat-curry recipes given elsewhere in the volume.