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Curried Vegetables and Macaroni
1/4 pound carrots 1 large apple 1 tablespoon flour 3 teaspoons curry powder 2 ounces butter 1 teaspoon chutney 1 teaspoon lemon juice 1 onion 3 potatoes 3 turnips 4 ounces macaroni 1 pint boiling water 1/4 pound mushrooms Cut the mushrooms, the vegetables, and the apple into small pieces, and fry in two ounces of butter. Mix the flour, chutney and curry powder together and sprinkle over the vegetables; add the lemon juice and stir over the fire for a few seconds, then add the boiling water and the macaroni which has been broken and boiled in salted water until tender. Mix well together and cook in a double saucepan for two hours. Serve with boiled rice.
A wartime-era vegetable curry bulked out with macaroni, meant to stand in for a meat main. The method is sound but the timing belongs to an age of coal ranges and standing pots.
- The two-hour double boilerA double saucepan is a double boiler: the mixture sits below boiling point, which is why the original can leave it two hours without scorching. The macaroni is already boiled tender, but the potatoes, turnips and carrots go in raw from the frying pan, so they need the long slow cooking to soften; shortening the time risks hard root vegetables, while the full two hours will take the pasta and potato very soft.
- Bloom the curry powderThe instruction to sprinkle the flour, chutney and curry over the hot buttered vegetables and stir before adding liquid is the hinge of the dish. Ground curry powder tastes dusty unless it meets hot fat; the recipe asks for only 'a few seconds', and it is worth giving it that at least. Do not shortcut it by stirring the powder into the water.
- Weights and volumes1/4 lb carrots is roughly two medium carrots; 1/4 lb mushrooms about 1 1/2 cups sliced; 2 ounces butter is 4 tablespoons; 4 ounces macaroni is a generous cup dry. Whether the pint is the 16 fl oz American or 20 fl oz imperial measure is not clear from the book, so add the smaller amount and loosen later if needed.
- TurnipsThree turnips here most likely means small white turnips rather than one large swede or rutabaga; two roots of roughly golf-ball to tennis-ball size are a reasonable reading of the quantity.
- ChutneyA teaspoon of chutney here most likely means a sweet fruit chutney, mango or apple, used as a seasoning rather than a condiment. Chop any large fruit pieces so it disperses.
- The appleSliced apple in a curry sauce was standard British practice of the period and it does real work here, dissolving into sweetness and body. A firm cooking apple holds its shape better than a soft eating variety.
- SaltNo salt is listed beyond the macaroni water. The dish needs seasoning at the end, particularly if the curry powder is a mild commercial blend.
- YieldServes four with the boiled rice, or three as a main course on its own.
Meatless cookery of this sort is often associated with the wartime kitchen, though nothing in the recipe itself fixes it to a particular moment. Curry powder was the obvious tool: it had been a fixture of the British domestic pantry since the late eighteenth century, sold ready-blended, and it could make a plate of carrots, turnips and potatoes taste like something deliberate. The apple-and-chutney sweetening is the signature of the anglicised curry that developed alongside it, a long way from any Indian regional practice and generally traced to the returning Anglo-Indian households who wanted the flavour without the technique. Macaroni doing duty as the substantial element, with rice served alongside as well, tells you how the period thought about filling a plate when the meat was gone: starch on starch, and no apology for it.