Home › Entrées › Lemon-juice (Salt Cut the meat in pieces)
Lemon-juice (Salt Cut the meat in pieces)
Salt. Cut the meat in pieces; slice the onions and put them in a saucepan with the butter, cardamoms, garlic, and cinnamon; cook all this over the fire until the onions are quite tender, taking care that they do not brown; then stir in the powder, paste, meat, and salt. Put the lid on and let it simmer in the oven. If the meat used is chicken or rabbit, one hour will be sufficient; if beef or mutton, two hours will not be too long; add then the lemon-juice, and serve with wellboiled rice, separately.
This is a straightforward braised curry of the late-Victorian British type: aromatics sweated in butter, curry powder and paste stirred in, meat simmered slowly under a lid. The quantities are not given in the text that survives, so treat the method as the guide and scale to about 2 lb of meat.
- The hinge: do not brown the onionsThe instruction to cook the onions until tender "taking care that they do not brown" is the whole character of the dish. Sweat them gently in butter over low heat for 15-20 minutes with the lid ajar; browning gives a sweet, roasted flavour that pulls the sauce away from the pale, buttery style intended here.
- "The powder, paste"Curry powder and commercial curry paste, both standard grocery items in Britain by the 1890s. For 2 lb of meat, allow about 1 tablespoon of curry powder and 1 tablespoon of paste. Fry them in the buttery onions for a minute or two before the meat goes in, or the raw spice taste persists.
- Cardamoms and cinnamonThe recipe does not say whole or ground, but since both go into the pan with the butter at the start, whole pods (lightly crushed) and a stick of cinnamon are the likely reading. Six to eight pods and one stick suit 2 lb of meat. Fish the cinnamon out before serving, and the pods too if you would rather not meet them at table.
- Oven temperatureNo oven heat is given; the text says only to let it simmer in the oven. A low oven, somewhere around 300-325F, will hold the barely-moving simmer wanted here. Use a heavy lidded casserole and check that the liquid is only just trembling; a true rolling simmer will dry the pan out over two hours.
- LiquidNo stock or water is specified, and the dish relies on the onions and meat juices. If the pan looks dry after the first 20 minutes, add a few tablespoons of stock rather than letting it catch.
- TimingsOne hour for chicken or rabbit is generous by modern standards; jointed chicken on the bone is done in 35-45 minutes at this temperature, and rabbit in about an hour. Beef or mutton cut into 1.5-inch pieces genuinely wants the full two hours.
- Lemon-juice at the endAdded off the heat, after cooking, so the sharpness stays bright. Start with the juice of half a lemon for 2 lb of meat and taste; it is there to lift the butter and spice, not to dominate.
- Rice served separately'Well-boiled rice' here means rice boiled in plenty of salted water and drained dry, sent to table in its own dish as the recipe directs. Allow 60-75 g of raw rice per person. The recipe gives no quantities; scaled to the 2 lb of meat suggested above it would serve four to six.
Curries of this kind occupied a settled place in the British repertoire by the time cookery manuals of the period were being written. Returning Anglo-Indian households had made curry powder and bottled curry paste ordinary grocery goods, and the resulting dishes were less an attempt at any particular Indian regional cooking than a distinct British genre: butter rather than ghee, onions sweated pale, whole cardamom and cinnamon for perfume, and a finishing acid. An entree in the formal service of the period was a made dish served between the fish and the roast, and a curry qualified precisely because it was composed, saucy and portioned in advance. The instruction to send the rice separately keeps the plated dish neat rather than mounded.