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Curry of Lamb
Make and serve the same as curry of beef, adding a half teaspoon of chopped mint if desired.
This is a variation card rather than a standalone recipe: everything depends on the curry of beef it points back to, which in books of this type means meat browned in fat, stewed with onion and curry powder, thickened with a little flour, and served with boiled rice. The notes below cover what changes when lamb replaces beef.
- The hinge: cut and cooking timeLamb shoulder or neck, cut in 1 to 1.5 inch cubes, is the right choice and wants 1 to 1.5 hours of bare simmering. Leg or loin will be dry and stringy long before a beef stewing time is up, so do not simply borrow the beef timing.
- Curry powder of the periodAmerican curry powder of this era was generally mild and turmeric-heavy, and a jar kept a long time would have lost strength. Modern blends are stronger; start with about a tablespoon for two pounds of meat and add more after tasting. Frying the powder briefly in the fat before the liquid goes in draws out more flavour than stirring it into the finished sauce.
- The mintThe recipe offers the half teaspoon of chopped mint as optional ('if desired'). If you use it, add it in the last few minutes so it stays green and fresh; cooked through the whole stew it turns dull.
- Fat and thickeningA base of this type would most likely have used butter or drippings with a flour thickening. Any neutral oil works, and if you would rather skip the flour, reduce the sauce uncovered for the last ten minutes instead.
- Sourness and richnessSome curries of this period are finished with a squeeze of lemon, and chopped sour apple appears in others. Lamb takes acidity well, and a little lemon juice at the end lifts a sauce that tastes flat.
- Yield and servingTwo pounds of boneless lamb feeds four to six with rice. Chutney and lemon were common accompaniments to curries of this kind, and the rice would normally have been boiled separately rather than cooked in the sauce.
Curry entered American home cookbooks by way of Britain, where Anglo-Indian households had been eating stewed-and-spiced meat with rice since the eighteenth century and where commercially blended curry powder was sold from the late 1700s onward. By the time loose-leaf collections like Mrs. Fryer's were in circulation, curry had been thoroughly domesticated: a mild, flour-thickened brown stew with a spoonful of powder in it. The mint may well be a British graft, plausibly borrowed from the mint sauce traditionally served with roast lamb, though mint is long-established in Indian cooking and the derivation is a reading rather than a demonstrated fact; on that reading its appearance here shows the recipe being adjusted to fit a familiar pairing rather than an imported one. The cross-reference format is characteristic of the loose-leaf cookbook, which saved space by letting one master method carry several meats.