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Chicken Curry
3 lb. chicken. 1/3 cup butter. 2 onions. 1 tablespoon curry powder 2 teaspoons salt 1 teaspoon vinegar Clean, dress, and cut chicken in pieces for serving. Put butter in a hot frying-pan, add chicken, and cook ten minutes; then add liver and gizzard and cook ten minutes longer. Cut onions in thin slices, and add to chicken with curry powder and salt. Add enough boiling water to cover, and simmer until chicken is tender. Remove chicken; strain, and thicken liquor with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily. Pour gravy over chicken, and serve with a border of rice or Turkish Pilaf.
A straightforward braise rather than a true curry: the chicken is browned, simmered with onion and curry powder, and the cooking liquor thickened into gravy. The method holds up; the quantities need judgement.
- Quantities to assumeThe printed ingredients give only the curry powder, salt and vinegar; butter, onions, flour and the bird itself are unquantified. A tablespoon of curry powder and two teaspoons of salt would sit comfortably with a bird of roughly 4 lb, cut for serving. Around 2 tablespoons butter for browning, two onions (the recipe says onions, plural), and about 2 tablespoons flour for the gravy will work.
- "Clean and dress"This means pluck, singe, draw and truss a bird bought whole and undressed. A supermarket chicken jointed at home, or a package of bone-in thighs and drumsticks, starts at the same point.
- Liver and gizzardThese come in the giblet bag. The gizzard wants the full simmer to soften; the liver will soften and break up, though the recipe has you strain the liquor, so much of it will be caught in the strainer. Leave the liver out if you want a clean-tasting gravy.
- Bloom the curry powderThe one step worth adding: let the curry powder fry with the onions and butter for a minute before the water goes in. Commercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty if it is only boiled.
- Simmering time"Until tender" is 35 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer for a modern bird. Keep it below a rolling boil or the breast pieces go stringy.
- The vinegarA teaspoon of vinegar is listed among the ingredients but the directions never say what to do with it. Stirring it into the finished gravy, off the heat, and tasting is the obvious course; a little acid lifts curry powder.
- ThickeningStrain the liquor, whisk the flour into cold water until smooth, then pour it into the simmering liquid and cook two to three minutes to lose the raw flour taste.
- YieldOn the assumed bird of about 4 lb, four to six with rice.
Curry powder reached American home cooking through Britain, where blended "curry stuff" had been sold since the late eighteenth century as a shortcut to the spicing of Anglo-Indian kitchens. By the time Fannie Farmer was writing, it was a familiar grocery item, and cookbooks of the period treat it much as they treat poultry seasoning: one measured spoonful, stirred in. The result is a mild fricassee with a curry accent rather than anything an Indian cook would recognize, and the suggested accompaniment of Turkish Pilaf, filed elsewhere in the same book, shows how loosely the period grouped anything spiced and rice-adjacent under a general Eastern heading. What is genuinely traditional here is the technique: browning the bird, simmering it in its own liquor, and binding the strained broth with flour, which is the standard American fricassee dressed in new spice.