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Chicken Curry
3-pound chicken. 1/3 cup butter. 2 small onions. Boiling water 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon vinegar 1 tablespoon curry powder Clean, singe and cut the chicken. Put the butter in a hot frying pan; add the chicken. Chop the giblets and onions; add salt, vinegar and curry powder. Cover with boiling water; place in the cooker for four hours, using one radiator. When ready to serve, remove the chicken. Thicken the liquid with flour; strain, and pour over the chicken. Garnish with a border of rice.
The ingredient list as printed is only the seasoning half of the recipe — the chicken, butter, onions and flour are named in the method but never measured. Everything else hinges on understanding what a fireless cooker actually was.
- What a fireless cooker isAn insulated box, not a heat source. Soapstone or cast-iron discs (the "radiators") were heated red-hot on the range, dropped into the well under and over the pot, and the box sealed. The food coasts to doneness on stored heat. "One radiator" means a single disc, the lower setting.
- Modern equivalentA heavy lidded pot in a 275-300F oven, or a slow cooker on low, both for about 3 to 4 hours. Either holds the temperature steadily rather than letting it fall, which is the one real weakness of retained-heat cooking with poultry.
- Start it genuinely boilingThe recipe is built on the food entering the cooker at a rolling boil. If you adapt it, bring the browned chicken and liquid fully to the boil on the stovetop before it goes into the oven or cooker, so it is not spending an hour climbing through lukewarm territory.
- Quantities to supplyA 3.5 to 4 lb chicken cut into serving pieces, 2 tablespoons butter for browning, one or two medium onions, and roughly 2 tablespoons flour to thicken at the end. The boiling water should just cover the chicken, around 3 to 4 cups.
- The curry powderCommercial curry powder of the period was generally mild, with turmeric dominant and coriander and fenugreek commonly in the blend. Add it to the hot butter with the onions for a minute before the liquid goes in — raw powder simmered in water tastes dusty, bloomed powder does not.
- GibletsHeart, gizzard and liver. The liver will disintegrate over four hours and muddy the sauce; use only heart and gizzard here, chopped fine, and cook the liver separately if you want it.
- Thickening and strainingWhisk the flour into a little cold water or soft butter first, stir it into the simmering liquid on the stove, and give it two or three minutes to lose the raw taste before straining. Straining removes the onion and giblet, so the sauce is smooth rather than chunky.
- YieldServes four to five with the rice border, which is a ring of plain boiled long-grain rice pressed round the edge of a hot platter, chicken and sauce in the centre.
Fireless cookery had its American moment in the first two decades of the twentieth century, when insulated cookers were sold commercially and promoted in home-economics classes as fuel-saving, safe to leave unattended, and well suited to houses without a stove burning all day. A cookbook of the period that carries a whole Fireless Cookery section is telling you something about its readership: households doing their own work, keen to put dinner in a box in the morning and find it done in the afternoon. The dish itself is curry in its Anglo-American form, the version that arrived through British colonial trade as a single ready-blended powder rather than a spice mixture ground for the occasion. Served with a border of rice and thickened with a flour liaison, it is closer to a fricassee with curry powder in it than to anything cooked in South Asia.