India Curry
1/2 1½ pounds veal 1/2 cup butter or drippings 2 onions or less 1/2 tablespoon curry or less Brown the meat without fat and cut into small pieces. Fry the onions in the butter; remove them; add the meat and curry powder; cover with boiling water and cook until tender. Serve in a wide border of rice.
A thrifty Anglo-American curry: mild, brothy, and built on a single spoonful of tinned curry powder. Two lines in the original need interpreting before you start.
- The garbled quantityThe printed "1/2 11/2 pounds veal" is a broken line; it almost certainly means 1 1/2 pounds of veal. Half a cup of butter for that much meat is generous by modern taste — 3 to 4 tablespoons is enough to soften the onions.
- "Brown the meat without fat"Sear the veal in a dry, heavy pan over high heat before cutting it up, so the surface colours without absorbing grease. Do it in batches; crowded meat steams instead of browning.
- The onions are seasoning, not vegetableThey are fried to flavour the fat and then lifted out. If you would rather eat them, slice them thin and leave them in — they will melt into the sauce over the cooking time.
- Bloom the curry powderAdd the powder to the hot fat with the meat and stir for 30 to 60 seconds before the water goes in. Commercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty if it is only simmered.
- How much curryHalf a tablespoon for 1 1/2 pounds of meat is very restrained by present-day standards, and the recipe's own "or less" suggests restraint was the point. If you want the curry to read clearly, 1 to 2 tablespoons will do it; taste as you go, since commercial blends vary in strength.
- Cooking timeCubed veal shoulder needs 60 to 90 minutes at a bare simmer, covered, to become tender; leaner cuts such as loin will toughen and are the wrong choice here. Add water only to barely cover, and reduce at the end if the sauce is thin.
- "Drippings"Rendered beef, pork or poultry fat saved from earlier cooking. Any neutral cooking fat works; bacon fat will add a smokiness, which may or may not be what you want here.
- A wide border of ricePlain boiled long-grain rice pressed into a ring mould or shaped with a spoon around the rim of a platter, curry in the centre. Figure about 3 cups cooked rice for four servings, which is what this quantity of meat yields.
Curry entered American household cookbooks by way of British India, arriving already translated: not a fresh-ground masala but a spoonful of commercial curry powder, sold in tins by the nineteenth century and treated in these books as a single seasoning like mace or paprika. That is why it reads as a stew technique with one flavouring rather than a cuisine of its own — it could as easily have been made with mutton or leftover roast. The ring of rice around a platter is a period serving convention seen with creamed and stewed dishes generally, and the choice of veal reflects an era when it was an ordinary, inexpensive butcher's meat rather than a specialty cut.