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Curried Salmon
Put a sliced Spanish onion in a stewpan with a piece of butter, fry it, then stir in one teaspoonful of curry powder, and one teaspoonful of curry paste; stir it over the fire for a few minutes, then pour in gradually one pint of broth, and add two pounds of salmon cut in small pieces. Let the curry simmer gently at the edge of the fire for an hour, skimming it now and then. Prepare a border of rice, turn it on to a hot dish, put the curry in the center and serve.
A short list of adjustments turns this into a dish worth eating; the hour-long simmer is the one line to ignore.
- The hinge: cooking timeTwo pounds of salmon in small pieces is done in 8 to 10 minutes at a bare simmer, and will fall to threads and dry curds after an hour. Build and simmer the sauce for 30 to 40 minutes to develop the onion and spice, then slide the fish in off the boil and hold it just below a simmer until it flakes.
- "The edge of the fire"On a coal range this meant the cooler outer ring, where a pan holds well below a boil without bubbling. On a modern burner it is the lowest setting, or a diffuser.
- Curry powder and curry pasteBoth were commercial goods in 1896 and both still are; the paste supplies oil, salt, tamarind or vinegar and does work the powder cannot. If you have no paste, use two teaspoons of powder and add a squeeze of lemon at the end. Fry the spice in the butter for two to three minutes only, until it smells toasted rather than raw.
- Spanish onionA large sweet yellow onion, 10-12 oz. Sliced thin and cooked gently in the butter until fully soft and just golden, it is the body of the sauce.
- BrothA pint is 2 cups. Fish stock or a light chicken broth both work; the original kitchen would have had both standing. The sauce is meant to be loose but not watery, so reduce it before the salmon goes in rather than after.
- SkimmingSalmon this rich throws a good deal of oil and some grey albumin. Lift it off as it collects, or the finished curry tastes greasy.
- The border of ricePlain boiled long-grain rice pressed into a buttered ring mould and turned out onto the platter. A ring cake pan does it; press firmly and unmould at once while hot. A plain mound of rice serves the same purpose if you would rather not.
- YieldTwo pounds of salmon and a pint of sauce serves four to six as a main course.
Curried fish was standard hotel and club cookery in the 1890s, arriving in American kitchens by way of British India and British restaurant practice rather than directly from South Asia, and by Oscar Tschirky's day both curry powder and curry paste were bought in tins from grocers such as Crosse & Blackwell. The construction here is thoroughly Anglo-French: an onion base, a spoon of blended spice bloomed in butter, moistened with the kitchen's stock, and served inside a moulded rice border in the manner then called en bordure. That the fish is salmon rather than a cheaper white fish reflects the Waldorf's larder, and the standing of salmon in the period as a luxury but not the rarity it later became; the long simmer, meanwhile, may say something about how late-Victorian kitchens handled fish, though that is a matter of inference rather than record.