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One Onion (II)
Ingredients.
Two ounces of Butter.
Two tablespoonfuls of Curry Powder.
Two ounces of Sweet Almonds.
Half a saltspoonful of Salt.
One Fowl. The Juice of half a Lemon.
Half a pint of Water.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, put in the onion sliced and stir over the fire, but do not brown.
Then add the fowl cut into rather small pieces, and cook all together for a few minutes. The curry powder should then be sprinkled over the fowl and the contents of the saucepan stirred carefully over the fire for five minutes.
Blanch the almonds and pound them with a little water. When they are quite fine put them in a strainer and pour over them the rest of the water, which should come from the almonds looking like milk. Add this almond milk and the salt to the curry, and cook slowly for about half an hour according to the age of the fowl. Add the lemonjuice a few minutes before serving. (Veal may be cooked by this recipe.) Grated cocoa-nut may be used instead of almonds.
A mild almond-milk chicken curry of the kind Anglo-Indian cooks called a "white curry". The printed ingredient list is incomplete, so read the method first and work backwards.
- The missing ingredientsThe list gives butter, curry powder, almonds, salt, lemon and water, but the method also calls for an onion and a fowl. The title supplies the onion; the fowl is unquantified. A jointed 3 to 3½ lb chicken, cut into small pieces, suits the half pint of almond milk.
- Fowl means fowlA Victorian "fowl" was a mature laying hen, tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler, which is why the recipe hedges with "about half an hour according to the age of the fowl". A supermarket chicken will be done in 25 to 30 minutes; an actual stewing hen needs an hour or more.
- Half a pintThis is a British Imperial pint, so half a pint is 10 imperial fl oz, or a scant 1¼ US cups. That is barely enough to cover the meat: the sauce should cling rather than swim.
- Almond milk from scratchTwo ounces of blanched almonds pounded with water and strained gives a thin, faintly starchy liquid quite unlike commercial almond drink, which is too dilute and often sweetened. A blender does the pounding in seconds; squeeze the pulp hard in a cloth rather than merely letting it drip.
- A saltspoonRoughly a quarter teaspoon, so half a saltspoonful is about ⅛ teaspoon. That is very little for a whole chicken; taste and correct at the end, bearing in mind that some commercial curry powders already contain salt.
- Bloom the powder properlyThe five minutes of stirring the curry powder with the meat and butter is the hinge of the dish. Raw curry powder tastes dusty and bitter; it needs fat and heat to open up.
- Keep it paleThe onion is explicitly not browned and the almond milk goes in unreduced, so keep the heat low throughout. Home-pounded almond milk can separate and turn grainy if boiled hard; the recipe adds the lemon juice only a few minutes before serving.
- Coconut insteadThe suggested substitution works well: use about 1¼ cups of unsweetened coconut milk, or steep 2 oz of grated unsweetened coconut in hot water and strain. Sweetened desiccated coconut is not a substitute.
- YieldServes four with plain boiled rice. The original assumes rice as a matter of course and does not mention it.
Curries of this kind entered British cookery through returning Anglo-Indian households, and by the late nineteenth century curries were a standard chapter in many substantial British cookery books. The almond-milk version belongs to a family of pale, unbrowned curries — often called white curries, and generally traced to the Mughal-influenced kormas of northern India, where ground nuts and dairy thicken a sauce that is aromatic rather than fiery. What survived the journey to a British kitchen was mostly the texture: the chilli heat was moderated, and the elaborate individual spicing was replaced by a spoonful of ready-made curry powder from a tin, a convenience already well established by the 1880s. The note that grated coconut may replace almonds, and that veal will do instead of fowl, is characteristic of the period's cookery writing, which treated a recipe as a template rather than a fixed formula.