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Lobster Curry
Put the meat of a large lobster into a stewpan with one blade of mace. 1 large cup of meat stock, or gravy. 1 tablespoonful corn starch, mixed smooth, with a little milk or cream. Add salt. 1 small piece of butter. 1 dessertspoonful curry powder. Juice of one lemon. Simmer for an hour and serve hot.--Mrs. C.
A simple curried lobster in the Anglo-Indian style, and one whose timing needs rethinking before anything else.
- The hour is the problemLobster meat is already cooked when it comes out of the shell, and an hour at a simmer turns it to cotton wool. Build and thicken the sauce first, then fold in the meat and warm it through for two or three minutes off a hard boil.
- QuantitiesA large lobster yields roughly ¾ to 1 lb of picked meat. A "large cup" of stock is about 8 to 10 fl oz; a dessertspoon of curry powder is about 2 teaspoons, and a "small piece" of butter perhaps 1 tablespoon.
- Blade of maceOne blade is a single dried strip of the aril around the nutmeg seed, removed before serving. If you only have ground mace, a scant pinch is enough — it is assertive.
- Corn starchA tablespoon of cornstarch slaked in cold milk will thicken a cup of stock to a coating sauce. Bring the stock to a simmer, stir the slurry in, and cook a minute or two to lose the raw starch taste.
- Curry powderNineteenth-century curry powder was a commercial blend heavy on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek. Frying it in the butter for thirty seconds before the stock goes in draws out far more flavour than stirring it into liquid.
- Lemon lastAdd the juice at the end, off the heat. Acid held at a simmer with cream or milk in the sauce will curdle it, and the brightness cooks away.
- YieldServes three to four; the original gives no accompaniment, saying only "serve hot."
Curry entered American cookbooks by way of Britain, where returning East India Company households had made curry powder a shop-bought pantry staple by the early nineteenth century. What arrived in Virginia kitchens was that anglicised version — a fixed spice blend stirred into a thickened gravy — rather than anything cooked in an Indian household, and it was applied freely to whatever the local larder offered, shellfish included. Housekeeping in Old Virginia (1879) was assembled by Marion Cabell Tyree from contributions by Virginia housewives, many of them credited only by initial, as here with Mrs. C.; the book's authority came from the reputations of the women behind each dish rather than from any single author.