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Curried Mutton
Chop a large onion and fry it in a pan with a tablespoonful of butter. Mix one tablespoonful each of curry powder and flour in a basin, add a teaspoonful of salt, and when thoroughly mixed add to the onion in the pan and pour in gradually a pint of water or broth. Chop two pounds of lean mutton into small pieces, fry in a little butter until they are a light brown, add to the curry and simmer till tender. Place the meat on a dish with a border of rice around it, and serve hot.
A plain nineteenth-century curry of the Anglo-Indian type: onion, curry powder, flour, liquid, browned meat. It works, but it wants more time and more seasoning than the terse instructions suggest.
- Cook the curry powderThe hinge is frying the flour-and-curry mixture in the buttered onion for a minute or two before any liquid goes in. Raw commercial curry powder tastes dusty and bitter; brief toasting in fat rounds it out and cooks the flour so the sauce is not pasty.
- Which muttonMutton here means mature sheep, rarely sold in the US. Lamb shoulder or leg is the practical substitute, cut into 1-inch pieces; boneless goat is closer to the original in flavor if you can get it.
- "Simmer till tender"Not a quick supper. Shoulder cut small needs roughly 1 to 1 1/2 hours at a bare simmer, covered, on low heat; the recipe keeps the pan on the stove throughout. Leg is leaner and is liable to dry out before it is tender, so shoulder is the better choice.
- LiquidA pint is 16 fl oz and will barely cover two pounds of meat. Use broth rather than water, and add more as it reduces; the flour will thicken it further as it cooks.
- Curry powderPeriod commercial blends were generally mild, heavy on turmeric and coriander. Modern blends vary widely in heat, so taste after the sauce comes together and adjust rather than trusting the measure.
- What is missingNo garlic, ginger, acid or finishing fat, which is why period curries can read flat to us. A squeeze of lemon at the end, or a spoonful of chutney stirred in, is in keeping with the accompaniments usually served alongside such curries.
- The rice borderPlain long-grain rice, boiled and drained, pressed into a ring around the meat. Figure about 1 1/2 cups raw rice for four servings, which is what two pounds of meat will give you.
Curry entered American hotel cookery by way of Britain, where returning East India Company men had made it a familiar dish of the club and the private house long before Oscar Tschirky was arranging service at the Waldorf. By the 1890s "curry powder" was a fixed commercial article sold in tins, a pre-blended shortcut standing in for a fresh-ground masala, and recipes like this one treat it as a single seasoning much as one would treat mustard or paprika. Mutton was a common partner: cheap, strongly flavored, and abundant in a period when sheep were kept as much for wool as for meat, and its assertiveness stood up to spice in a way that veal or chicken did not. The rice border was common in the era, in domestic as well as hotel cookery, the same trick used for creamed dishes and hashes, and it presumably served to hold the sauce and give the plate a finished shape.