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Country Captain
I HEN OR FRYING CHICKEN FLOUR PAPRIKA FAT FOR FRYING 2 TABLESPOONS BUTTER I LARGE ONION I LARGE GREEN PIMIENTO 2 GARLIC CLOVES, MINCED 34 TABLESPOON CURRY RED PEPPER BLACK PEPPER 34 TEASPOON SALT 2 TEASPOONS MUSTARD- PREPARED HOT ENGLISH I TABLESPOON WORCES- TERSHIRE I TABLESPOON WHOLE CLOVES I TEASPOON VINEGAR I LARGE CAN TOMATOES 34 TABLESPOON THYME 4 TABLESPOONS CHOPPED PARSLEY 1/3 CUP CURRANTS 1/2 CUP ALMONDS COOKED RICE Skin and cut up chicken as for frying. Dip in flour to which paprika has been added. Fry in fairly deep fat. Then steam in baking pan with about a cup of water, until quite tender. Put in another frying pan butter, onion, green pimiento and garlic. Do not brown this, but add a little water to keep from browning. Add curry, red and black pepper, mustard, salt, Worcestershire, cloves, vinegar, tomatoes, thyme and parsley. Cook a little and add 4 tablespoons of grease the chicken was fried in. Put all in a roaster over the chicken, adding currants on top, and cook 45 minutes. Toast almonds; do not salt or put them in grease. Place the chicken and sauce over cooked rice on a platter; sprinkle toasted almonds on top and serve hot.
A Georgia coastal curry that reads long but breaks into three simple stages: fry the chicken, build the sauce, then bake them together. The ingredient list gives no oven temperature and several quantities that need interpreting.
- The hinge: don't brown the aromaticsThe instruction to add a little water to the onion, pepper and garlic so they sweat rather than color is what keeps the sauce sweet and clean-tasting. Browned garlic turns the whole dish bitter under the curry powder.
- Oven heat for the final bakeThe 45 minutes in the roaster is presumably an oven step, but the recipe gives no temperature at all. A moderate oven is a reasonable modern guess; the chicken is already cooked through and this stage is only to marry the sauce.
- "Green pimiento"Here this means one large fresh green sweet pepper, seeded and chopped, not the jarred red pimiento sold for stuffing olives.
- The three-quarter measuresThe curry, the thyme and the salt are all fractional in the original: read them as 3/4 tablespoon curry powder, 3/4 tablespoon dried thyme and 3/4 teaspoon salt. Taste at the end, since commercial curry powders vary widely in salt and heat.
- A tablespoon of whole clovesThat is a great many cloves, and it is deliberate in this style of dish, but the sauce is not strained afterward. Tie them in a small square of cheesecloth so they can be lifted out, or cut back to a teaspoon if your cloves are fresh and potent.
- Curry powder wants a little fat and heatStir the curry into the buttered vegetables for a minute before the tomatoes go in. Raw curry powder dropped into liquid keeps a dusty, chalky edge.
- AlmondsBlanched whole or slivered almonds, toasted dry in a skillet or in the oven until fragrant. The instruction not to salt or grease them is sound: they are a garnish against a rich sauce and should stay crisp.
- Steaming stepAbout a cup of water in the baking pan does the work here; the recipe gives neither a temperature nor a time. A cut-up frying chicken needs only a short spell, while an older hen will take considerably longer, which is why the recipe says only 'until quite tender.'
- YieldOne chicken with this quantity of sauce serves four generously over rice, or six if there are other dishes on the table.
Country Captain is a curried chicken associated with the Georgia and South Carolina low country, above all with Savannah and later with Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning, where it became a standard dish for visiting officers. The name is traditionally explained as a tribute to a "country captain" in the East India trade, a shipmaster sailing the coastal routes who brought curry powder and spices into Southern ports; that story is repeated everywhere but not documented. What is clear from the recipe itself is the trade route: curry powder, cloves, currants and almonds are the vocabulary of Anglo-Indian cooking, grafted onto a Southern skillet-fried chicken and served over rice, which the rice country of coastal Georgia had in abundance. The dish is often said to have been a favorite of Franklin Roosevelt, another claim generally traced to Georgia lore rather than to a record.