Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Curried Lamb
Curried Lamb
Cut a cooked leg of lamb into middling-sized dice, and remove all the skin and gristle. Fry a chopped onion in a stewpan with a little butter until browned, then put in two breakfast cupfuls of well washed and dried rice, stir a few minutes over the fire, moisten to twice its height with unskimmed broth, and boil the rice on a slow fire adding frequently more broth to prevent it from getting too dry. When nearly tender mix in two small tablespoonfuls of curry powder diluted with three tablespoonfuls of tomato sauce, and stir over the fire for two or three minutes, then take it off, put in the chopped meat, place the lid on the saucepan and stand it at the side of the fire to heat the lamb thoroughly. Pour the gravy on a hot dish with fried bread, and serve.
A pilaf-style use for the tail end of a roast leg of lamb, cooked entirely on the stovetop. The one thing to get right is that the lamb is already cooked and goes in off the heat — it is being warmed through, not stewed.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Two cupfuls of raw rice is close to a pound, enough for six or so servings, so halve everything if you are feeding four.
- Unskimmed brothBroth with the fat left on rather than lifted off. It is doing the work of added butter here; a well-made lamb or chicken stock that has not been degreased is the intent, and you will need roughly 4 to 5 cups for 2 cups of rice, added in stages.
- Moisten to twice its heightPour in liquid to double the depth of the rice in the pan — the old cook's gauge for about a 2:1 ratio. The instruction to keep adding broth means this is closer to a risotto technique than a covered pilaf, so it wants attention rather than a timer.
- Side of the fireOn a coal range, the cool edge of the top plate. Translate as the lowest possible burner setting, or off the heat entirely on a heavy pan, lid on, for 8 to 10 minutes. Bringing already-roasted lamb back to a simmer only makes it stringy.
- Curry powder"Two small tablespoonfuls" of a Victorian commercial blend; such blends were typically turmeric-forward and are usually reckoned to have been milder than modern powders. Start with one tablespoon of a contemporary madras blend and taste. Blooming it in the tomato sauce, as directed, takes the raw edge off.
- Tomato sauceNot pasta sauce and not ketchup — it most likely means the plain thickened tomato sauce of the classical repertoire. Passata, or tomato puree loosened with a little stock, does the job.
- Pour the gravy on a hot dishThe phrasing is loose; nothing here is a separate gravy. Turn the whole rice-and-lamb mixture onto a warmed platter and ring it with the fried bread.
- Fried breadTriangles or small cubes of white bread fried in butter or clarified fat until crisp — sippets or croutons. Fry them while the lamb is warming through so they stay crisp.
Curried leftovers were a fixture of nineteenth-century Anglo-American cooking, and this is a réchauffé — a made-over dish, the polite Victorian answer to Monday's cold roast. Curry powder reached British and then American kitchens largely as a ready-made commercial blend, sold by grocers and typically turmeric-heavy, bearing only a family resemblance to any Indian spice mixture.