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One Onion (Teaspoonful of Chutney)
One teaspoonful of Chutney.
One ounce and a half of Butter. One clove of Garlic. One Shalot. Half a pint of good Stock.
One teaspoonful of Curry Powder.
One ounce of chopped Indian Pickle and Chilli.
One gill of very good Espagnole Sauce.
Fry the shalot, garlic and onion in the butter, then add the curry-powder, also the chutney and stock; boil all well for twenty minutes, then add the sauce, boil it all well and skim it. Wring through a tammy, and add the chopped pickle.
A curry-flavoured brown sauce of the classic French repertoire as filtered through late-Victorian England. Note before starting that the printed ingredient list is incomplete: the method calls for shallot, garlic, onion and butter, but only the onion appears in the title and none of the aromatics are given quantities.
- The missing aromaticsTake the title's one onion as given, and add a shallot and a clove of garlic, all finely chopped, with about half an ounce of butter to sweat them in. The quantities appear to have dropped out of the printed list at some point, so these are a reasonable reading rather than a conversion.
- Gill and pintA gill is a quarter of an Imperial pint, five Imperial fluid ounces, a little over half a US cup. Half an Imperial pint of stock is 10 fl oz, so you begin with about 15 fl oz of liquid in all -- near enough 1 3/4 US cups -- to be reduced down to a sauce.
- EspagnoleThe brown mother sauce: brown roux, brown stock, mirepoix and tomato, simmered and skimmed for hours. A good reduced brown veal stock or a demi-glace stands in for it here without harming the result.
- Fry, do not brownThe onion, shallot and garlic should soften and go translucent only. Colour on the aromatics plus the curry powder's own scorching point gives the finished sauce a bitter edge that twenty minutes of boiling will not remove.
- Bloom the curry powderStir the powder into the buttery aromatics for half a minute before the stock goes in. Victorian commercial curry powder was coarse and heavily turmeric-based; blooming it in fat is what keeps the raw, dusty note out.
- Indian pickle and chilliIn Victorian usage this covered mixed vegetable pickles sharp with mustard and vinegar, of the piccalilli type, as well as mango and lime achar; the chilli is named alongside it in the ingredient line. An ounce is roughly two tablespoons chopped, and it goes in after the straining so it keeps some texture in the finished sauce.
- TammyA tammy is a worsted straining cloth, wrung between two people to force the sauce through. A fine chinois pressed with a ladle does the same work; a blender first will make the pressing quick.
- YieldAbout a cup of finished sauce, enough for four to six portions. A small sauce of this kind would suit reheated meat, cutlets, kidneys or hard-boiled eggs rather than being served in quantity, though the recipe itself does not say.
This belongs to the family of curry-flavoured brown sauces that appear in English professional cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, usually under names like sauce Indienne, and built on the French foundation of an Espagnole. The pattern is characteristic: an Indian flavour vocabulary of chutney, curry powder and mixed pickle bolted onto a classical French sauce base, made possible by the commercial bottled goods that firms such as Crosse & Blackwell were selling into English kitchens by then. "High class cookery" books of this period were written for the cook in a large private household or a club, where a batch of Espagnole stood ready and small derivative sauces like this one were run off from it to order. The garbled ingredient list, missing its shallot and butter, is a common feature of such books.