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Chicken Curry
602. Cut up the chicken raw, slice onions, and fry both in butter with great care, of a fine light brown; or, if you use chickens that have been dressed, fry only the onions. Lay the joints, cut into two or three pieces each, into a stewpan, with a veal or mutton gravy, and a clove or two of garlic. Simmer till the chicken is quite tender. Half an hour before serving it, rub smooth a spoonful or two of currypowder, a spoonful of flour, and an ounce of butter; and add this, with four large spoonfuls of cream, to the stew. Salt to the taste. When serving, squeeze in a little lemon. Slices of under-done veal, or rabbit, turkey, &c., make excellent curry. Rice boiled dry must be served round the curry. For directions to do this, see following par. Another Chicken Curry, more easily made. -Cut up a chicken or young rabbit; if chicken, take off the skin. Roll each piece in a mixture of a large spoonful of flour, and half an ounce of curry-powder. Slice tivo or three onions, and fry them in butter, of a light brown; then add the meat, and fry all together till the meat begins to brown. Put it all into a stewpan, and pour boiling water enough just to cover it. Simmer very gently two or three hours. If too thick, put more water half an hour before serving. If the meat has been dressed before, a little broth will be better than water; but the curry is richer when made of fresh meat.
Another. Take two large spoonfuls of curry-powder, mix it with a teacupful of water, half a teacupful of vinegar, and a dessert-spoonful of salt. Stew slowly for an hour, and when it becomes too thick add a little more vinegar and water. About three-quarters of an hour before dinner, put in the fowl, veal, mutton, or fish, cut into squaresized pieces, and previously fried of a pale-brown, with six large onions sliced thin. Then stew the whole together till it becomes quite tender.
Three Anglo-Indian curries of the older school, built on commercial curry powder rather than freshly ground spice. The instructions assume a cook who knows what a stewpan and a "dressed" fowl are, and they assume the tough, slow-cooking birds of the period.
- "Dressed" means already cookedThroughout this entry, meat that has "been dressed" is leftover roast or boiled meat, not meat that has been cleaned and trussed. That is why the first version says to fry only the onions in that case, and why the second recommends broth over water.
- Cooking times were written for old birdsThe second version's two to three hours of gentle simmering suits a mature fowl or a wild rabbit. A modern chicken, jointed, is tender in 35 to 45 minutes and will shred to threads long before three hours are up. Thighs and drumsticks hold up better than breast.
- Spoonfuls are not standardisedIn a book of this date a "spoonful" is generally a tablespoon and a "large spoonful" a generous one, but the measure is genuinely loose. Two tablespoons of curry powder to a whole chicken is a reasonable modern reading of the first recipe; taste and add rather than commit at the start.
- Curry powder has changedCurry powder has changed on were were typically built on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek, and were generally milder than many blends sold today, though composition varied considerably from maker to maker. Present-day blends vary enormously in heat, so begin at the low end. In the first and second versions the powder is cooked in fat or with flour, which is what takes the raw edge off it.
- The thickening in the first versionRubbing curry powder, flour and butter smooth and stirring it into the simmering stew is a beurre manié. Add it in small pieces off a hard boil and let it cook a good ten minutes, or the flour will taste raw and the sauce will be grainy.
- Cream and lemon go in lastFour spoonfuls of cream added half an hour before serving will hold if the pan is barely trembling, not boiling. The lemon belongs off the heat at the moment of serving; added early it flattens and can curdle the cream.
- The third version is a sauce baseThe third version is a sauce base —a a way of mellowing a harsh powder. Six sliced onions is a large amount for one fowl; it cooks down to the body of the sauce, so do not reduce it out of alarm.
- Rice served round the dish"Boiled dry" means separate grains, drained and steamed off, not the creamy rice of a pudding. Long-grain rice rinsed until the water runs clear, boiled in plenty of salted water and drained, gives what the recipe intends.
- YieldYield — The first two versions should serve about four from one chicken, with rice. The third gives no quantity of meat; with six onions it would clearly be intended to stretch further.