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Curry of Chicken
Take a chicken weighing one and onehalf or two pounds and cut up as for fricassee; put into a stewpan with sufficient water to cover it, and boil, closely covered, till tender; put in a large teaspoon of salt and cook a few minutes longer; remove from the fire, take the chicken out and pour the liquor into a bowl. Put into the stewpan two small onions with a piece of butter the size of an egg and fry till brown; then skim them out and put in the chicken; fry for three or four minutes and then sprinkle over it two teaspoons of curry powder. Next pour in the chicken liquor, stew five minutes longer, and stir in one tablespoon of sifted flour made thin with a little water; allow it to thicken, stir in the beaten yolk of one egg and serve with a border of hot boiled rice.
A late-Victorian curry in the English style: the bird is poached first, then browned and finished in its own broth with a yolk-thickened sauce. Two details decide whether it works.
- The yolk goes in off the heatOnce the beaten yolk is stirred in, the sauce must not return to a boil or it will curdle into threads. Pull the pan off the burner, temper the yolk with a few spoonfuls of hot liquid first, then stir it back in.
- Butter the size of an eggAbout 2 ounces, or 4 tablespoons. Victorian books measured fat by comparison to eggs, walnuts and hazelnuts; an egg is the largest of the three.
- Bird sizeA 1½-to-2-pound chicken was a genuinely small young fowl. A supermarket bird runs 3½ to 4½ pounds, so either halve it or use about 2 pounds of bone-in thighs and drumsticks, keeping the salt as written for that weight.
- Cook the curry powderThe recipe sprinkles the powder over the frying chicken for good reason. Give it 30 to 60 seconds in the hot butter before the liquid goes in; raw curry powder stirred into broth tastes dusty and flat.
- Two teaspoons is mildCommercial curry powder of the period was mild and heavy on turmeric and coriander. Modern blends vary widely, and anyone used to a hotter curry will want considerably more, plus a squeeze of lemon at the end.
- Poaching time"Till tender" is 30 to 40 minutes for young pieces at a bare simmer, longer for an older bird. Keep the water at a shiver rather than a rolling boil, or the meat shreds and the broth clouds.
- Skim the onions out, or don'tThe original takes the browned onions out and does not return them, so they flavour the butter and leave nothing visible in the sauce. Leaving them in makes a fuller dish; chop them if you do.
- YieldServes three, or four with a generous border of rice. Plan on about 1½ cups raw long-grain rice.
By the time the Butterick Publishing Company issued its cook book, "curry" in an American or English household meant a specific formula rather than any particular Indian dish: meat cooked in stock, seasoned from a tin of ready-mixed curry powder, thickened, and ringed with boiled rice. That powder is generally traced to British commercial enterprise of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, an attempt to bottle the effect of the fresh-ground masalas cooks in India assembled dish by dish. The egg-yolk finish and the flour-and-water thickening here are pure European kitchen practice, and the ring of rice around the edge of the platter — the "border" — was a standard service style of the period, used for hashes, creamed dishes and stews alike.