Home › Entrées › Entrées: Indienne
Entrées: Indienne
Bobotages à l'Indienne are made of pounded mutton, curried, steamed in little moulds, and served with a curry sauce.
Kabobs à l'Indienne are little pieces of curried mutton put on skewers with button onions and slices of tomatoes; served with rice, and curry sauce.
Pâté à la Romaine is a baked mould of macaroni filled with layers of mince and macaroni.
Petits pâtés de mouton à la Windsor are small covered patties filled with minced mutton, brown sauce, chopped mushrooms, etc.
Petits pâtés de Cornouailles are Cornish pasties.
Kidneys dressed as- Rognons de mouton à l'épicurienne are cut open, breadcrumbed and broiled, and the hollows filled with Tartare sauce; served with devil sauce. à la brochette are dressed in the same way, the hollow of the kidneys filled with a lump of Maître d'hôtel butter. à la Vénitienne-cut in halves, fried in butter with chopped shallots, and dressed on a border; brown sauce with anchovy butter, etc. au vin de Champagne. Thin slices served in a white sauce with champagne, or other white wine, and mushrooms. en ragoût. Thin slices cooked in butter, with wine, flour, chopped mushrooms, shallot, etc.
Rognons de mouton sautés aux épinards. Slices sauté, and served with dressed spinach. Served on a border of spinach with a rich brown sauce, they are à la Princesse. They are also dressed à la Dufferin with brown caper sauce and fried potatoes; à la Milanaise-with macaroni; à la Maître d'hôtel-with Maître d'hôtel sauce.
Petits pâtés, or bouchées, aux rognons are slices in white sauce put into little patties.
Curry, skewers, patties and sheep’s kidneys, all filed as small made dishes. The page is a good illustration of how far the word curry had travelled from anything cooked in India.
- Curry sauceNot a single spice is named anywhere on the page. The curry sauce of this kitchen was a flour-thickened brown or white sauce with bought curry powder stirred in, and a cook following these lines today would arrive at something much closer to a Victorian English gravy than to any Indian dish.
- KabobsKabobs à l’Indienne — pieces of curried mutton with button onions and tomato on a skewer, rice alongside — needs no translation at all. It is the one entry a modern cook would recognise on sight, which is worth noticing: the thing that survived was the technique, not the sauce.
- Sheep’s kidneysStill sold cheaply wherever a butcher keeps offal. They want the thin membrane pulled off and the white core cut out, and they go from done to rubber inside a minute. The split-and-broil treatment here, with a lump of parsley butter in the hollow, is the breakfast kidney of the period and is still the best thing to do with them.
- Maître d’hôtel butterButter worked with chopped parsley, lemon juice and seasoning, chilled and cut into lumps. It appears on this page in several different dishes and it has not changed in any respect.
- Devil sauceDevilling means heat: mustard, cayenne, something sharp. The page pairs it with kidneys whose hollows are filled with Tartare sauce, so the dish arrives cold in the middle and hot round the outside at once.
- Cornish pastiesPetits pâtés de Cornouailles is the book at its most transparent. The pasty is not altered in any way. It has been renamed, and nothing more, so that it can appear on a French card.
What this page records is the Indian dish as it reached the English dinner table, not directly but through the French menu card, so that curried mutton becomes à l’Indienne and a mutton skewer sits three lines above a Cornish pasty with no sense of distance between them. Both have been flattened into the same system. À la Simla, à la Windsor, à la Dufferin, à la Vénitienne: a hill station, a castle, a titled name and a city, used interchangeably as labels for garnishes. Curry in this book is not foreign food at all, it is one more sauce in a numbered repertoire, and a cook who could make the other sauces was expected to make this one without ever being told what went into it.