Prawns, Curried
INGREDIENTS for entrée for 3 persons.-2 dozen prawns, 2 oz. of butter, 2 tablespoonfuls of currypowder, a sour apple, an onion, a small cocoanut, the juice of 1/2 lemon, 1/2 pint of stock. AVERAGE COST, 2s. 6d.
Melt the butter in a stewpan, and fry in it the onion, cut in very thin slices; stir in the curry-powder, and see that the mixture is smooth before adding the stock, which should first be made hot. Next add the apple, chopped, and a large tablespoonful of grated cocoanut, and salt to taste, and simmer for about 1/4 hour. Then put in the prawns, picked, a wineglassful of the cocoanut-milk and the lemon-juice, and let the fish get quite hot. Serve with boiled rice, as other curries.
Tinned prawns can also be used for curry, and cost far less than the fresh ones.
TIME.-15 minutes to simmer.
SEASONABLE at any time.
A late-Victorian English curry: fried onion, curry powder, stock and fresh coconut, with the prawns added only at the end. The method is sound, but the quantities assume a cook who buys prawns by the dozen and cracks her own coconut.
- The hinge: heat the prawns, do not cook themThe sauce is simmered first and finished by letting the prawns "get quite hot" — a minute or two, no more. Prawns held in simmering liquid turn tight and cottony within about three minutes, and already-cooked or tinned prawns need only warming through.
- Two dozen prawnsBeeton means prawns bought ready-boiled and 'picked' from the shell. Large raw tiger prawns work but need a little longer and should be added to sauce that is barely bubbling.
- StewpanA wide, straight-sided saucepan or a sauté pan with a lid. Nothing special is required — any 2 to 3 quart pan will do.
- Curry powderVictorian commercial curry powders were generally built on turmeric and coriander, but blends varied and some were fiercely hot, so two tablespoons is not a safe guide to a modern tin. Start with one tablespoon of a modern mild blend and taste. Frying the powder in the butter until it smells toasted, before the liquid goes in, is what stops it tasting raw and dusty.
- The coconutA "small cocoanut" supplies both the grated flesh and the water inside, which she calls cocoanut-milk. A wineglassful is about 2 fl oz. Canned coconut milk is a fair substitute for that liquid; for the grated flesh, unsweetened desiccated coconut, briefly soaked in a little hot stock, gives the same texture.
- A sour appleA cooking apple — Bramley in Britain, Granny Smith elsewhere. It dissolves during the quarter-hour simmer and is the sauce's only real body, since there is no flour or thickening.
- Hot stockShe specifies the stock be heated before it meets the butter-and-powder paste; cold liquid seizes the mixture into lumps. Fish or light chicken stock; half a pint is 10 fl oz in imperial measure, about 1 1/4 US cups.
- Yield and servingThree as a light main course with rice, or four as one course of a larger meal. The sauce is thin by modern expectations — it is meant to run into the rice rather than coat the prawns.
Curry entered the English repertoire through the East India Company and was thoroughly domesticated by Beeton's day: bought curry powder, an apple for sweetness and acidity, and a British stock base rather than a ground fresh masala. The pattern here " — fry onion, bloom the powder, moisten with stock, add fruit — is the standard nineteenth-century English curry formula, applied to whatever protein was to hand. The closing note that tinned prawns cost far less than fresh suggests a post-1861 revision: canned fish and shellfish were cheap and widely trusted by the turn of the century, and Beeton's revisers were writing for households counting shillings.