India Curry
Wipe a slice of veal one-half inch thick, weighing one and one-half pounds, and cook in frying-pan without butter, quickly searing one side, then the other. Place on a board and cut in one and one-half inch pieces. Fry two sliced onions in one-half cup butter until brown, remove onions, and add to the butter, meat, and one-half tablespoon curry powder, then cover with boiling water. Cook slowly until meat is tender. Thicken with flour diluted with enough cold water to pour easily; then add one teaspoon vinegar. Serve with a border of steamed rice.
A plain stovetop veal curry of the sort American cookbooks printed under "India" for half a century: seared meat, browned onions, curry powder, water, flour. It works, but a few of Farmer's proportions and habits need translating.
- The hinge: bloom the curry powder in the fatThe recipe has you add the powder to the hot butter with the meat before any liquid goes in. Give it a full minute of stirring in the fat before the boiling water — commercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty otherwise, and once it is in a watery braise it will not improve.
- Half a cup of butter is a lotThat is 4 ounces for a pound and a half of meat. Two to three tablespoons will brown the onions and carry the spice; the rest simply floats on the finished sauce.
- The onionsFarmer removes the browned onions and never returns them — they are there to flavor the butter. If you would rather not waste them, leave them in, or chop rather than slice them so they melt into the sauce.
- Cut of vealA half-inch "slice" weighing a pound and a half means a broad piece off the leg or shoulder. Shoulder is the better buy and stands up to long simmering; leg cutlet is lean and can go dry. Cubes of shoulder sold for stew work fine, seared in batches.
- "Cook slowly until meat is tender"Reckon on 1 to 1½ hours at a bare simmer, lid ajar, depending on the cut. Add water as needed to keep the meat barely covered.
- ThickeningAbout 2 tablespoons flour shaken with ¼ cup cold water makes a pourable slurry for this quantity of liquid. Stir it in gradually and let the sauce boil a minute or two, or it will taste of paste.
- Curry powderCommercial powders of Farmer's day were generally milder and more turmeric-forward than today's, and half a tablespoon for this quantity gives a gentle dish. Current supermarket powders are stronger; taste and add more toward the end if it reads flat.
- Yield and the rice borderProbably serves four. A "border of steamed rice" means spooning plain rice around the rim of a hot platter with the curry in the middle — about 1½ cups raw rice should do it.
Curry entered American cookbooks by way of Britain, where returning East India Company families had made spiced stews and bottled curry powder a fixture of the middle-class table by the early nineteenth century. By the time Fannie Farmer was teaching at the Boston Cooking School, curry powder was a shelf staple sold in tins, and "India Curry" of this kind — one blended spice, a flour-thickened gravy, a ring of rice — describes an Anglo-American dish rather than anything cooked on the subcontinent. The teaspoon of vinegar at the end is a genuine echo of older English curry practice, which often reached for vinegar, lemon or tamarind to sharpen the sauce. Its placement in the veal chapter is telling: curry powder was treated as a way to use up a plain cut of meat.