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Lentil Curry
Chop three or four onions with a clove of garlic and two green peppers, then pound them in a mortar. Wash one-half pound of lentils, picking them over carefully, put them in a fryingpan and toss about over the fire until browned, then put them into a saucepan with the pounded mixture, one teaspoonful of ground turmeric, a little salt and cold water to cover, boiling until tender. When cooked drain all the water from the lentils and add two ounces of butter and two sliced onions fried to a golden brown. Toss all over the fire for a few minutes, then turn it onto a hot dish, garnish with sippets of toast, and serve with plain boiled rice.
A straightforward dal in Edwardian dress. Two details carry the dish: the dry-toasting of the lentils before they ever meet liquid, and the second batch of fried onions stirred in at the end.
- Toast the lentils properlyTossing the washed lentils in a dry pan until browned is the step that separates this from plain boiled pulse; it gives a nutty, faintly roasted flavour that survives the long simmer. Use a wide dry skillet over medium heat and keep them moving until they smell toasty and take colour, five to eight minutes. Wet lentils will steam first, so let them drain well.
- Which lentilHalf a pound is about one and a quarter cups dry, yielding roughly three cups cooked. The recipe assumes a lentil that holds its shape after browning and boiling, so brown or green lentils are right; red or split lentils collapse to puree and will not take the toasting well.
- "Cold water to cover"Add water an inch above the lentils and top up as needed rather than drowning them, since everything is drained at the end and you would pour off the flavour. Expect 25 to 35 minutes at a bare simmer for brown or green lentils.
- SaltA little salt at the start is fine, but the real seasoning happens after draining, when the butter and fried onions go in. Taste then; drained lentils absorb more salt than you expect.
- The mortarThree or four onions, a garlic clove and two green peppers pounded to a paste is a food processor job now. Pulse rather than puree, or you will get a watery slurry that stews the lentils instead of flavouring them.
- Green peppersIn an 1890s American hotel kitchen this probably means sweet green bell peppers rather than chiles, though the term was not used consistently at the time. If you want heat, add it deliberately; the recipe as written specifies none.
- Turmeric aloneOne teaspoon of ground turmeric is the entire spicing beyond the onion, garlic and peppers, which is a common feature of hotel 'curries' of this sort. Turmeric is bitter and chalky raw, so let the mixture cook the full simmering time; it needs the heat to mellow.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread toasted or fried in butter, arranged around the edge of the dish. A long-established English garnish for anything soft and spoonable, still routine in Victorian cookery.
- YieldServes four as a main course with the boiled rice, or six as a side. It reheats well, though the fried onions lose their crispness.
Oscar Tschirky's Cook Book (1896) was compiled at a moment when "curry" in American and British hotel kitchens meant almost anything savoury, yellow with turmeric, and served with a rim of boiled rice — a dish shaped less by South Asian cooking than by the British colonial table that had already reinterpreted it once. What survives here of the original is genuine enough: lentils dry-roasted before boiling, aromatics pounded to a paste, and a finish of ghee-like butter with browned onions, all of which are recognisable techniques in Indian dal cookery, where the final addition of fat and fried aromatics is generally called a tempering. What has been stripped away is the spicing, reduced to a single teaspoon of turmeric — a fair index of how cautiously the Waldorf expected its clientele to be seasoned. The sippets of toast, meanwhile, are thoroughly English and a good deal older than the Victorian table they reached it by, a garnish inherited from centuries of serving sops of bread with anything wet.