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Chicken Curry
3 Pounds Chicken 1-3 Cup Butter Substitute 2 Onions 1 Tablespoon Curry Powder 2 Teaspoons Salt 1 Teaspoon Vinegar Clean, dress, and cut chicken in pieces for serving. Put grease in a hot fryingpan, 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 curry in the South Asian sense: chicken browned in fat, stewed with onion and curry powder, the cooking liquor strained and thickened into gravy. A few of the instructions assume a 1910s kitchen.
- The vinegar is orphanedA teaspoon of vinegar is listed among the ingredients and then never mentioned again in the method. Add it with the onions and curry powder, where it does some good sharpening the sauce, or leave it out entirely.
- Butter substituteThis means oleomargarine or a vegetable shortening such as Crisco, both cheaper than butter and common in thrift-minded cookbooks of the period. One-third cup of butter, ghee or a neutral oil does the same work.
- Clean and dressAssumes a bird bought whole with head, feet and innards. A 3 lb chicken cut into serving pieces is the modern equivalent; buy the liver and gizzard separately if you want them, since cut-up birds won't include them and whole birds may or may not.
- Bloom the curry powderPeriod curry powder was a mild turmeric-heavy blend and needs heat and fat to stop tasting dusty. Stir it into the pan with the onions for a minute before the water goes in, and expect to use more than one tablespoon if your powder is a modern supermarket blend.
- Simmer time"Until tender" was written for a tougher fowl. A modern chicken will be done in 35 to 45 minutes at a bare simmer; dark meat holds up better than breast, which may want pulling out earlier.
- Thickening the liquorThe recipe doesn't say how much 'enough boiling water to cover' amounts to, so gauge the flour to the volume you end up with -- roughly a tablespoon or so per cup of strained liquor, slaked in cold water as the recipe directs. Whisk it into the simmering liquor and cook two or three minutes so the raw flour taste goes.
- The rice borderPlain boiled rice arranged in a ring around the edge of the platter, sometimes pressed into a mould and turned out, with the chicken in the middle. Turkish pilaf in books of this period generally means rice cooked in fat and stock with tomato.
- YieldFour servings, generously, with rice.
Curried chicken had been a fixture of English and American household cookery for well over a century by the time this book appeared, arriving through the British Indian trade and settling into a standard form: meat stewed with onion and a commercial curry powder, thickened with flour, served in a ring of rice. Curry powder itself was a British convenience, a pre-mixed approximation of spices that an Indian cook would have ground fresh and varied by dish, and its ubiquity in bottled form is what let a recipe like this run to six lines. The "butter substitute" and the careful use of liver and gizzard point to a practical kind of cookery, one in which nothing edible in the bird went to waste and margarine was assumed rather than apologised for.