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Curried Potatoes
Cook one-fourth cup butter with one small onion, finely chopped, until yellow; add three cups cold boiled potato cubes, and cook until potatoes have absorbed butter, then add from one-half to three-fourths cup White Stock, one half tablespoon each curry powder and lemon juice, and salt and pepper to taste. Cook until potatoes have absorbed stock. S
A straightforward skillet dish from Fannie Farmer's potato chapter, built on leftovers. The only real technique is patience in the pan.
- White StockFarmer's White Stock is a mild veal (or veal-and-fowl) broth, lightly salted and gently seasoned with vegetables and a few peppercorns. Any low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will overwhelm the curry.
- Curry powderA half tablespoon in three cups of potato is assertive by 1896 standards and mild by today's. Commercial curry powder of the period was typically a turmeric-heavy blend bought ready-mixed rather than ground at home; bloom it in the butter for thirty seconds before the stock goes in to take the raw edge off, since the recipe as written adds it late.
- Cold boiled potatoesThe potatoes must be cold and fully set, or the cubes break down into hash. Boil them the day before, or at minimum chill them thoroughly. Three cups of cubes works out to roughly 1 to 1 1/4 lb of potatoes.
- Butter quantityA quarter cup is 4 tablespoons — generous, and deliberately so. The potatoes are meant to drink it up before any liquid is added, which is what gives the finished dish its body.
- Two absorptionsThe instruction to cook until the potatoes have absorbed the butter, and again until they have absorbed the stock, is the hinge. Rushing either stage leaves you with wet, greasy cubes rather than something glazed.
- Lemon at the endThe lemon juice goes in with the stock, but a second squeeze off the heat sharpens a dish that otherwise reads flat and buttery.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; three cups of potato will serve about four as a side dish. Best eaten freshly made.
Curried potatoes sit in the potato section of the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book alongside a dozen other ways of reviving cold boiled potatoes — Lyonnaise, creamed, Delmonico, in balls and cakes. Curry powder reached American kitchens through British trade and British cookbooks, and by the 1890s it seems to have been treated less as an approximation of Indian cooking than as a single seasoning in its own right, much like paprika or celery salt. Farmer's treatment is characteristic: the spice is one measured ingredient among five, and the real subject of the recipe is thrift. Cold potato was the household's most reliable surplus, and a cooking school that trained women to run kitchens on a budget gave it a set of uses of its own.