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Curry of Veal (Large onion tablespoon butter)
1 large onion 1 tablespoon butter 1 tablespoon curry powder 2 pounds lean veal 1 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons flour 1 pint hot water Fry the onion in the butter. Mix curry powder, salt and ficar, and stir into the butter and onion. Add gradually the hot water or stock. Cut the veal in small pieces, and brown them in hot fat. Add them to sauce; remove to the cooker for four or five hours, using one radiator. Place meat on hot platter and arrange a border of boiled rice.
A fireless-cooker recipe, which means the technique matters more than the ingredient list: everything must go into the insulated box boiling hot, because no further heat will be added. Translated to a modern kitchen it becomes an ordinary braise.
- "Ficar" is flourA typesetting slip for the flour already listed. Mix the curry powder, salt and the 2 tablespoons flour together dry, then stir into the buttered onion.
- One radiatorFireless cookers came with soapstone or cast-iron discs that were heated on the range until hot, then packed into the insulated well above or below the food. "Using one radiator" means a single disc, i.e. moderate heat for a long haul, not two for a hard boil.
- Modern equivalentBring the sauce and meat to a full boil in the pot, cover, and give it 2 to 2.5 hours in a 325F oven, or 4 to 5 hours on a slow cooker's low setting. A fireless cooker only coasts downward from whatever temperature you seal in, so the food must be genuinely boiling when it goes in and the box must not be opened to check.
- Bloom the curry powderFrying the powder in the butter with the onion before the liquid goes in is the hinge of the dish. Commercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty if it is only stirred into liquid; a minute in hot fat is what makes the sauce taste cooked.
- VealTwo pounds of lean veal shoulder or breast, cut in 1-inch pieces, is what this wants. Cutlet meat is wasted here. Boneless lamb shoulder or pork shoulder behaves the same way over a long braise if veal is hard to come by.
- LiquidA pint is 2 cups. It will look scant against 2 pounds of meat, and that is correct for a sealed pot where nothing evaporates; in an open oven braise you may need a little more.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. The "border of boiled rice" is a ring of rice pressed round the edge of a hot platter with the curry spooned into the middle, a common way of serving curry in this period. Figure about 1.5 cups raw long-grain rice.
Fireless cookery was a genuine movement in American kitchens either side of 1910: an insulated box, a set of heated soapstone discs, and food that finished itself while the range was cold and the cook was out. Its selling points were fuel economy and safety, and a number of cookbooks of the period carried a fireless section alongside the ordinary ones. The dish itself belongs to the long Anglo-American afterlife of Indian cooking, in which "curry" meant a floured, mildly spiced brown sauce built from commercial curry powder rather than whole spices ground at home; veal was a common carrier for it, its mildness leaving the powder to do the work.