Bobotee
Put 2 tablespoonfuls of butter in a frying-pan; add 1 slice of onion; fry until brown; add 2 ounces of bread, free from crust, and 1 pint of milk; mix lightly; take from the fire and stand aside for ten minutes. Blanch and chop 8 almonds very fine; add them to the other mixture; then add 1 teaspoonful of curry powder, 1 pint of cold, cooked meat chopped fine, and 3 eggs well beaten; mix all the ingredients together. Ruba baking dish with butter, and sprinkle over it 1 teaspoonful of lemon juice, turn in the mixture and bake in a moderate oven for twenty minutes.
Serve with it plain boiled rice.
A leftovers dish under a curried custard, better known today by its South African spelling, bobotie. The measurements are volumetric in the old American style, so the meat is measured by the cup rather than weighed.
- "1 pint of cold, cooked meat"A volume measure: two cups of finely chopped cooked meat, roughly 12 oz to 1 lb once packed. Lamb or beef is traditional, and yesterday's roast is the point of the dish.
- Moderate ovenConventionally taken as somewhere in the region of 350F, though the recipe gives no temperature. The mixture is essentially a savoury custard, so avoid anything hotter or the eggs will curdle and weep.
- Twenty minutes is optimisticTwenty minutes looks short -- with a pint of milk and three eggs the custard will probably need considerably longer, until the centre is just set and no longer liquid when tilted. Twenty minutes would suit only a thin layer.
- The bread and milkTwo ounces of crustless bread is about two slices. It soaks in the whole pint of hot milk, so use stale bread if you have it; fresh will collapse to paste, which does no real harm but gives a smoother texture.
- Curry powderA single teaspoon is mild by modern standards; many modern bobotie recipes use a tablespoon or more, often with turmeric added. Cooks wanting a more pronounced spicing will want more than a teaspoon.
- Blanching almondsCover them with boiling water for a minute and the skins slip off between finger and thumb. Blanched slivered almonds from a packet do the same job.
- Lemon juice in the dishSprinkling it over the buttered dish rather than into the mixture is unusual; stirring it into the meat mixture would distribute the acidity more evenly.
- YieldProbably about four servings with the boiled rice. Chutney or a sharp fruit preserve alongside is usual in South African practice and would make up for the mild seasoning here.
Bobotie is a Cape dish, associated with the Cape Malay community of South Africa — i.e. descendants of people enslaved and exiled from the Indonesian archipelago and South Asia by the Dutch East India Company from the seventeenth century onward. The name is generally traced to the Indonesian bobotok, a spiced preparation, often with coconut, steamed in banana leaf, though the connection is traditional rather than documented, and the baked, custard-topped version is thoroughly Cape. Its appearance in an American low-cost cookery book has less to do with that history than with economy: the recipe stretches a pint of cold roast meat with bread, milk and eggs into a dish for several people, which is exactly the arithmetic such books were written to teach. The spelling bobotee is one of the forms found in nineteenth-century English-language cookbooks, arriving largely through British colonial households and their published collections.