Curry
There are few dishes which it is so difficult to get well done as a curry. In France, under the name of Kari, it is always bad. In England the vulgar theory is that, with the addition of some curry-powder, any good stew becomes a good curry. It is a great mistake. First of all, a curry differs from other stews in being always eaten with a dessert-spoon and fork-never, when rightly under. stood, with a knife and fork. This implies that it is exceedingly well done, and is cut or shred small. Secondly, it has no other accompaniment than the rice. Curry is never to be eaten at a house where the host offers you a potato with the rice. It is a sign that there is no garnish in his curry-no onions, no apples, no cocoanut: else he would not overlay all these with potatoes in addition to rice. On the difficulty of procuring a good curry-powder it is useless Curry to insist indeed, few people see the difficulty. There are good curry-powders at the shops, and that is enough for them. They have not grasped the fact that curry-powder is like salad dressing-a compound; and that as in the salad dressing some people like plenty of vinegar and little oil, while others wish for plenty of oil and very little vinegar, so in the curry-powder there are ingredients which should be increased or decreased to suit different tastes, and to combine with the different meats which are to be curried. All over India there is a curry for almost every province: at Madras one kind of curry; in Bengal another. In Ceylon they would never dream of taking curry-powder out of a bottle. The curry mixture is there made fresh on the day it is to be used in cooking; and it consists of a piece of green ginger, a few coriander and cumin seeds, two cloves of garlic, six small onions, one chili, eight peppercorns, a small piece of turmeric, a teaspoonful of butter, half a cocoanut, and half a lime. In England, the ginger of this receipt, the coriander and cumin seeds, the chili and the turmeric, are powdered, and sold in bottles under the name of curry-powder; and this is supposed to be all that is wanted the English cook, for the most part, ignoring the garlic and onion, the cocoanut and the lime; and expecting that, if any other flavour is needed, it will be supplied at table from the bottle of Bengal Chutney. Supposing a good powder is at hand-say Halford's-it is to be used in the following manner, which is a modification of a well-known receipt.
Take the white heart of a cabbage or a lettuce peeled down to the size of an egg; chop it fine, and add to it two apples in thin slices, the juice of a lemon, a saltspoonful of black pepper, and a tablespoonful of curry-powder--to be all well mixed together. Then take six onions that have been chopped fine and fried brown, a clove of garlic minced small, two ounces of fresh butter, two of flour, and one pint of beef gravy; boil them up, and when boiling add to them Custards the other set of ingredients containing the acids and spices. Let all be well stewed, and then add to it-cut or shredthe fish, flesh, or fowl for which this savoury mess has been prepared. Serve it with abundance of rice every grain of which should be separate. It is the rice in this combination that is the great attraction for many people. But in following this receipt the cook must use some discretion; first in regard to the acids, second in regard to the onions. One apple may contain as much acid as two ; and onions are of all sizes. So that here the receipt is very indefinite, and the cook has to be cautious.
Beneath the lecturing there is a workable Anglo-Indian recipe: a spiced, apple-and-onion sauce built on a roux, into which cooked meat is folded at the end. A few of its assumptions need translating.
- The hinge: the meat goes in lastThe sauce is stewed to completion before the "fish, flesh, or fowl" is added, and the meat is to be "cut or shred" small. The text does not say whether it goes in raw or already cooked, but adding it at the very end suits cooked meat — leftover roast, boiled fowl or cold mutton — needing only to heat through; long stewing turns shredded cooked meat to threads.
- Curry powder is a starting pointThe whole preamble is an argument that bottled powder is an incomplete mixture. Halford's was one of several proprietary brands sold at the time and is not a blend you will find now. Any decent madras-style blend works, but the point stands: adjust with extra cumin, coriander or chilli to suit the meat.
- Beef gravyNot gravy in the modern sense but strained, reduced meat broth, a standard item in a well-run Victorian kitchen. A pint (an imperial pint is 20 fl oz, so about 2 1/2 US cups) of good beef or chicken stock is the substitute.
- Two ounces butter, two of flourThat is a proper roux — 2 oz butter is about 4 tablespoons, 2 oz flour about 1/2 cup — for one pint of liquid, which will give a thick, coating sauce closer to a Victorian curry than to anything Indian. Halve the flour if you want it looser.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. Note that no salt is called for anywhere else in the recipe; season the finished sauce to taste.
- The Ceylon mixtureIf you want to follow the fresh-ground alternative described earlier: green ginger is fresh ginger root, and "a small piece of turmeric" is most likely fresh rhizome, though about a teaspoon of ground turmeric stands in. The six small onions are probably the small red onions closest to shallots. The book gives no method for combining the ingredients.
- Rice"Every grain separate" means a long-grain rice, rinsed until the water runs clear. Basmati absorbed in 1 1/2 times its volume of water, then rested off the heat, does what the book asks.
- YieldThe sauce quantities suit about 1 1/2 to 2 lb of cooked meat and will serve four to six.
- The vague measurements are acknowledgedThe text admits it: apples and onions vary. The receipt calls for two apples and six onions; if in doubt start at the lower end of that, taste before adding the lemon juice, and hold back some of the acid until the end.
Kettner's Book of the Table (1877) was written by the journalist E. S. Dallas and published under the name of Auguste Kettner, the Soho restaurateur, and this entry is characteristic of it — half culinary dictionary, half opinionated essay. Curry had been in English cookbooks since the mid-eighteenth century, and by the 1870s bottled curry powder was a staple grocery item, sold by competing proprietary brands of which Halford's was one. What the author is objecting to is precisely that convenience: the reduction of a whole regional grammar of fresh-ground masalas to a single jar of turmeric-heavy dust. His insistence that curry is eaten with a spoon and takes no potato reflects the Anglo-Indian dining rules of returned Company and Raj households, for whom the dish was a familiar taste rather than an exotic one. The Bengal chutney he mentions in passing is the sweet mango preserve that British firms were already bottling for the home market.