Beans, Curried
INGREDIENTS for sufficient for 4 persons. pint of haricot beans, 1 apple, 1 onion, 1 dessertspoonful of curry-powder and flour mixed, a little butter, 1/4 pint of water, 1/2 lb. of rice. AVERAGE COST, 7d.
Bake the beans in water in a slow oven till tender, chop the onion and apple fine and fry in butter; next add the flour and curry, and last of all the water. Boil and thicken, then add the beans and serve with a border of boiled rice.
A plain Edwardian curry of dried white beans, thickened with a flour-and-curry roux and ringed with rice. The quantities are imperial and the oven work is slow.
- Haricot beansThese are dried white navy beans, not fresh green beans. The quantity is garbled in the text; an imperial pint of dry beans weighs somewhere around a pound (roughly 450 g), giving several cups cooked. Soak overnight before cooking.
- Slow ovenReckoned at roughly 250-300F/120-150C. Covered in water at that heat the beans will want two to three hours; a covered pot simmered on the hob, or a pressure cooker, does the same job faster.
- SaltThe recipe names none. Salt the beans once they have softened, and season the sauce at the end, or the dish reads flat.
- Spoon and liquid measuresA dessertspoonful is about 2 teaspoons, so the curry powder and flour together come to roughly that; use closer to a tablespoon of each if you want a sauce with body. A quarter of an imperial pint is 5 fl oz, a scant 2/3 cup.
- Cook the curry powderAdd the powder and flour to the fried onion and apple and let them cook in the butter a minute or two before the water goes in. Raw curry powder loosened straight into liquid tastes dusty.
- Bean liquorUse some of the water the beans cooked in rather than plain water. It is starchy and savoury and helps the sauce cling.
- The rice borderHalf a pound of rice, boiled and drained dry, was pressed into a ring around the edge of a hot dish with the curry spooned into the centre. Serve it alongside if you prefer; the rice needs to be dry-grained either way.
- YieldFour, as stated, as a main dish. The average cost is given as 7d.
Curried vegetables and pulses ran right through late-Victorian and Edwardian English cookery, where curry powder was a bought blend sold by grocers and treated as a single seasoning rather than a set of spices to be handled individually. The apple is the tell: Anglo-Indian curry sauces of this period almost always carried apple, and sometimes sultanas, for a sweetness that softened the commercial powder. Haricot beans arrived cheap and dried, kept well in the store cupboard, and were pushed hard in household manuals as a meat substitute for economical and meatless days, which is why a dish costing sevenpence to feed four earns its place here. The border of rice is a serving convention of the era, used to make an inexpensive stew look composed on the dish.