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Sauce for the Ris de Veau
en Kari.
Ingredients.
One pint of White Stock.
One gill of Cream.
Two ounces of Butter.
One tablespoonful of Curry Powder One teaspoonful of Chutney.
One teaspoonful of Lemon Juice.
A saltspoonful of castor Sugar.
Salt. One small Onion.
One small clove of Garlic.
Fry the onion and garlic in one ounce of butter; then add the curry powder, chutney, sugar, salt, and stock. Let this cook for ten minutes; stir in the lemon juice and cream, and last of all the butter; after the butter is in, the sauce must not boil. Pass the sauce through a tammy, and pour over the sweetbreads.
Salade de Perdreau (or any other bird) à la Carpentras. (Salad of Partridge.) Ingredients.
One cold roast Partridge.
A curry-cream sauce finished with butter off the heat, meant to be poured over cooked veal sweetbreads. The recipe assumes you already have the sweetbreads prepared and a good white stock on hand.
- The hinge: no boiling after the butterOnce the cream and the final ounce of butter go in, keep the pan below a simmer. Boiling will split the emulsion and leave you with a broken, greasy sauce rather than a glossy one. Take the pan off the heat and swirl the butter in a piece at a time.
- Gill and pintThe measures are imperial (gill, castor sugar, tammy all point that way): a gill is 5 imperial fl oz, a scant 2/3 US cup, and the pint is 20 imperial fl oz, about 2 1/3 US cups. So roughly 2 1/3 cups stock to a generous 1/2 cup cream.
- TammyA tammy was a worsted cloth through which sauces were wrung by two people twisting opposite ends. A fine chinois, or a fine sieve lined with muslin, does the same work; press with a ladle rather than wringing.
- White stockA light unroasted veal or chicken stock, unsalted and unreduced. Modern commercial stock is usually already salted, so hold back the salt until after the ten-minute cooking.
- Cook out the curry powderPeriod curry powders were often coarser and less thoroughly cooked-out than commercial jars today. The recipe adds the powder along with the stock, but frying it in the butter with the onion and garlic for a minute first helps avoid a dusty taste.
- ChutneyMost likely a sweet, spiced fruit chutney of the mango type, common in British kitchens of the period, though the recipe does not specify. A teaspoonful is there for sweet-sour depth; chop any large fruit pieces so they pass the sieve.
- Ris de veauThe sauce assumes sweetbreads already soaked in several changes of cold water, blanched, trimmed of membrane, pressed flat under a weight and then braised or sautéed. None of that is given here; find those instructions separately.
- Two stray fragmentsStray fragment -- The last lines are the opening of an unrelated partridge salad that has bled in from the next entry. Ignore them.
"En Kari" reflects a nineteenth-century French spelling of curry, which reached European kitchens by way of British India and appeared in the classical repertoire as a cream sauce with a spoonful of powder and a spoonful of chutney — a long way from any Indian original. Ris de veau, veal sweetbreads, were a prized item on a late-Victorian menu: delicate, expensive and laborious to prepare, and generally served in small portions as an entrée. The direction to pass everything through a tammy marks the book's professional register, and tammy cloth was common equipment in well-staffed kitchens before fine wire sieves became cheap.