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Curried Rice
Mix smoothly one dessertspoonful of curry-paste with one tablespoonful of rich brown gravy; place it in a saucepan with one breakfast cupful more of the gravy and boil; then add to it one pound of well-washed rice, and simmer it gently at the side of the fire for thirty minutes, or until the rice is done. Turn it out onto a dish, squeeze over the juice of half a lemon, and serve.
A short Victorian-style side dish written for a coal range, with the vague measurements typical of professional notes. The liquid quantity is the one thing that will not work as printed.
- Liquid is far too littleA pound of raw rice is about 2 1/2 cups and will absorb roughly 5 cups of liquid. One breakfast cupful of gravy plus a tablespoon will scorch long before the grain is cooked, so plan on scaling the liquid to the rice — brown gravy thinned with stock — and keep the pot covered.
- Dessertspoon and breakfast cupA dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons; a breakfastcupful is 8 to 10 fluid ounces, larger than a teacup. Both were common period measures, but the ratio here is still off.
- "At the side of the fire"On a range this meant the cooler edge of the top plate — a bare simmer with no bubbling at the center. The modern equivalent is the lowest burner setting with a lid on.
- Curry pasteHe means a commercial British curry paste of the period, oily and vinegar-sharp rather than sweet. A jarred Madras or Patak's-style paste is the closest thing on a supermarket shelf; a dry curry powder is not interchangeable, since it wants to be fried in fat to lose its raw taste.
- Bloom the paste firstThe instruction to mix the paste smoothly with a single tablespoon of gravy before adding the rest is the hinge of the recipe. Slack it out into a paste-free slurry, or the spice will sit in unpleasant lumps through the finished rice.
- Rice type and washing"Well-washed" rice in 1896 meant rinsing off surface starch and grit; do it until the water runs clear so the grains stay separate. Long-grain rice suits this; short-grain or arborio will go sticky.
- Thirty minutesThat is right for the low, covered, absorption method described, but check at 18 to 20 minutes with modern milled long-grain rice.
- YieldA pound of rice cooks up to roughly 7 cups — eight to ten side-dish portions. Halve everything for a household meal.
- The lemonSqueezed over the rice off the heat, just before it goes to table, for acid rather than flavoring the cooking liquid. Do not add it early; the brightness is the point.
Oscar Tschirky's 1896 book catches curry at the point where it had become thoroughly domesticated in Anglo-American hotel cooking — not an Indian dish but a British one, built on bottled curry paste and the brown gravy any large kitchen kept at hand. Curry powders had been sold commercially in London since the late eighteenth century, and pastes were staples of British grocery by the 1890s, which is why a New York chef could treat "one dessertspoonful of curry-paste" as a fixed, known quantity requiring no further description. The finishing squeeze of lemon supplies the sourness expected of curry, in place of tamarind or lime.