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One Onion (Half ounces of Butter)
Two Carrots. Two Turnips. Half a pint of Green Peas. Two Potatoes. One and a half ounces of Butter.
Half a pint of Stock.
One tablespoonful of Curry Powder.
One teaspoonful of Lemon-juice.
One teaspoonful of Salt.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, add the onion sliced, and fry a few minutes. Then add the curry powder and stock mixed together, the salt, and the lemon-juice, and boil all together for about five minutes.
Have ready the carrots, turnips, and potatoes, cut into small pieces and boiled separately, and the peas nicely cooked. Put these vegetables into the curry and warm for about five minutes.
White Curry (Chicken).
A vegetable curry of the Anglo-Indian type: a curry-powder sauce made separately and used to dress vegetables that have already been boiled. The printed ingredient list has clearly lost a line or two, so some quantities have to be judged.
- Missing quantitiesThe heading names one onion and 1½ oz butter, but the vegetables are only mentioned in the method with no weights given. For the half pint of sauce, reckon on about 1½ lb of mixed carrot, turnip and potato with a handful of peas — enough to serve four.
- Half a pint of stockAn imperial half pint is 10 fl oz, or about 1¼ US cups. Any light meat or vegetable stock works; the sauce is thin by design, more of a dressing than a gravy.
- Curry powder needs the fatCurry powder and the fat -- The one instruction worth improving on: stir the tablespoon of curry powder into the buttered onion for a minute over low heat before the stock goes in. Many period curry recipes fry the powder in the butter rather than, as here, mixing it with the stock; raw powder boiled in liquid tends to taste dusty and chalky.
- Don't scorch itGround turmeric and coriander burn quickly in butter. Keep the pan below a sizzle, and take it off the heat the moment the mixture smells toasted rather than raw.
- Cook the vegetables separatelyThis is deliberate, not fussiness. Each root needs a different time, and boiling them in the sauce would cloud it with starch. Drain them well before they go in or the curry will be watery.
- The final warmingFive minutes is enough to heat cooked vegetables through. Longer and the potato breaks up and the peas grey off.
- Lemon at the endThe teaspoon of lemon juice is added early here, but acid dulls with boiling. Add half at the start and the rest off the heat if you want the sharpness to register.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted stock and unsalted cooking water for the vegetables. If either is seasoned, hold back and taste.
- ServingBoiled rice is the usual accompaniment in books of this kind, commonly handed in a separate dish. The recipe itself gives no serving instruction.
Curry powder — a single premixed blend standing in for the many separate spices of an Indian kitchen — was a British commercial invention, sold by London grocers from the late eighteenth century onward and firmly established in household cookery by the time books like this were written. The method here is characteristically Anglo-Indian: a sauce built in the English manner from butter, stock and a spoonful of powder, then used to coat vegetables cooked in the ordinary English way. The trailing line "White Curry (Chicken)" is the catchline for the next recipe in the section.