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Curried Fish
1 1/2 lbs. cooked fish. 1 large apple. 1 lemon. 1/2 lb. (1 cup) boiled rice. 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) butter 2 large onions I large apple 2 heaping tablespoonfuls (2 ozs.) rice flour 1 tablespoonful curry powder 1 tablespoonful chutney I lemon 1 teaspoonful salt 1½ pints (3 cups) fish stock 1/2 lb. (I cup) boiled rice ½ cupful shrimps 2 hard cooked eggs Free the fish from skin and bones. Melt the butter in a fireproof dish, then put in the apple and the onion cut into small pieces, fry together until a nice brown color, then stir in the rice flour, curry powder, chutney, the strained juice of the lemon, salt, and stock; simmer for fifty minutes, then add the fish. Arrange the hot boiled rice around a casserole, turn the curry into the center; garnish with the shrimps made hot in a little cream and quarters of the hard cooked eggs.
Serve very hot.
A Victorian-Anglo-Indian fish curry dressed up for the fashionable fireproof casserole. Two things need attention before you start: the fish quantity is missing from the ingredient list, and the long simmer belongs to the sauce, not the fish.
- The missing fishThe list gives no weight for the fish itself, only the instruction to free it from skin and bones. A sauce built on three cups of stock will carry about 1½ lb of firm white fish — cod, haddock, halibut, monkfish — cut in large chunks. Treat any figure as your own judgment, not the author's.
- Add the fish at the endThe fifty-minute simmer is for the curry sauce, to cook out the raw curry powder and rice flour. Fish chunks slipped in at that point need only 5 to 8 minutes at a bare simmer, off the boil, until they just flake. Longer and they shred into the sauce.
- "Fireproof dish"Here it must mean a vessel that can sit directly on the burner, since the butter is melted and the onion and apple fried in it: a flameproof casserole or earthenware pot. An ordinary stoneware baking dish will crack. Use a heavy saucepan or Dutch oven and transfer to a serving casserole at the end, which appears to be what the recipe's second casserole is for.
- Rice flourSold in Asian and gluten-free sections today, and worth seeking out: it thickens more lightly than wheat flour and does not cloud. Two ounces to three cups of stock gives a coating sauce. Cornstarch is not a straight swap — it would need roughly half the weight and should be slurried, not fried in the butter.
- Fish stock1½ pints, i.e. 3 cups (the original's "1/2 pints" is a dropped figure). Bottled clam juice diluted with water works, or simmer the trimmings and bones you removed from the fish for 20 minutes with an onion and a bay leaf — no longer, or fish stock turns bitter.
- Chutney and curry powderA tablespoon of chutney implies a sweet mango-style preserve of the Major Grey kind; chop any large chunks. Commercial curry powders of the period were generally milder and more turmeric-heavy than many sold now, so a single tablespoon in three cups of stock is likely to read as gentle. Bloom it in the butter with the flour, as the recipe directs, rather than adding it later.
- The shrimp garnish1½ cups of small cooked shrimp warmed in a few tablespoons of cream — heat them through only, 1 to 2 minutes. Shrimp held in hot cream for any length of time go tough and weep water into the sauce.
- YieldEnough for 4 to 6 as a main course, with the half-pound of boiled rice banked around the edge. Have the rice hot and dry before the curry is finished; the presentation collapses if it steams.
Curried fish of this type is Anglo-Indian by descent and thoroughly British by the time it reached American cookbooks — commercial curry powder, a spoonful of bottled chutney, lemon juice for sharpness, and a ring of rice with hard-cooked egg quarters, the same vocabulary that produced kedgeree and mulligatawny. What makes this version a period piece is the vessel. The early 1900s saw a vogue for "fireproof" earthenware and glazed casseroles that could go from the stovetop to the table, and slim volumes like this one appeared alongside them. That accounts for the slightly odd two-pot structure here: the curry is built in one and served from another, because the second one is the point. The rice flour is the other tell — a thickener often met with in curry sauces of the period, and said to keep the sauce clear and to let it reheat without going pasty.