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East India Curry
604. Cut up the rabbit or other meat and sprinkle it with flour. Fry it in butter with two middling-sized onions cut small, then put it into a stewpan with one pint of good beef gravy, one large tablespoonful of curry-powder, one table-spoonful of mushroom ketchup, one tea-spoonful of salt, two ounces of butter, the juice of a small lemon, one large potato and one large apple chopped, and stew for twenty minutes. Serve with rice.
A mid-Victorian British curry: flour-dusted meat, onions, commercial curry powder and a sweet-sour lift from apple and lemon. It works, but two of its instructions need adjusting before it will taste or eat well.
- Twenty minutes is not enough for rabbitA jointed wild rabbit needs 45-75 minutes of gentle simmering before the leg and shoulder meat gives way; farmed rabbit around 40 minutes. Twenty minutes suits only chicken thigh or already-cooked leftover meat, which is very likely what the original intended by "other meat". Cook to tenderness, not to the clock.
- Fry the curry powderThe hinge of the dish. Victorian curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty and chalky if it is simply stirred into liquid. Add it to the onions and butter in the pan and cook it a minute or two until it smells toasted before the gravy goes in.
- "Good beef gravy"Not thickened gravy from a joint but the period's brown stock educed and well flavoured. A pint (20 fl oz, about 2 1/2 cups) of decent beef stock does the job; the flour on the meat provides all the thickening required.
- Mushroom ketchupA thin, dark, salty mushroom extract, still sold by a few British makers. A tablespoon of a good soy sauce, or of Worcestershire sauce plus a little water, gives a comparable savoury depth. It is not tomato ketchup in any sense.
- Butter twice overButter for frying, then two more ounces (55 g, half a stick) into the stew. That second addition is the sauce's richness and body; if you want a lighter dish, cut it to an ounce rather than skipping the frying fat.
- Apple and potatoChopped small, the apple largely breaks down and both act as much as thickener and sweetener as vegetables. A cooking apple such as Bramley collapses usefully; a firmer eating apple will stay in pieces. Cut the potato small if you want it gone, in chunks if you want it to stay.
- SaltA full teaspoon assumes unsalted stock and unsalted butter. With shop-bought stock and salted butter, hold most of it back and season at the end, after the lemon juice.
- YieldA rabbit, or an equivalent 2 lb of meat, in a pint of sauce serves four with rice. Plain long-grain rice, boiled and drained, is the usual period accompaniment.
Curry was well established in British kitchens by the middle of the nineteenth century: not an exotic dish but a standard way of using up rabbit, cold mutton or yesterday's fowl, built on bought curry powder rather than ground spices. The apple and the mushroom ketchup are English additions, sweetness and savoury depth supplied by whatever the larder held, and the result belongs more to the Anglo-Indian repertoire than to any regional Indian cooking. The name "East India" is usually taken to point at the East India Company, whose returning officials and their households did much to fix this style of curry in British domestic cookery.