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Curried Dishes
Miss Beaty.
Chickens and veal are most suitable for curries. Boil the meat till tender, and separate the joint. Put a little butter in a stew-pan with the chickens, pour on a part of the liquor in which the meat was boiled, enough to cover it and let it stew twenty minutes more. Prepare the curry thus; for four pounds of meat take a tablespoonful of curry powder, a teacup of boiled rice, and a tablespoonful of flour and another of melted butter, a teacup of the liquor and half a teaspoonful of salt; mix them, and pour them over the meat, and let stew ten minutes more. Rice should be boiled for an accompaniment.
A mild Victorian curry built on boiled meat and its own broth, thickened with rice and flour rather than reduced sauce. The method is sound; the seasoning is where it needs help.
- The hinge: bloom the powderHere the powder goes in raw at the end, mixed cold with the flour and liquor, which can leave a dusty, chalky edge. Fry the tablespoon of powder in the melted butter with the flour for a minute before adding liquid, and the flavour deepens considerably.
- Curry powder then and nowCommercial powders of the 1870s were typically turmeric-heavy and, by modern standards, generally mild, though blends varied in heat. A tablespoon for four pounds of meat is timid by modern standards — expect to use two or three, and taste as you go.
- A teacupNot a modern 8-ounce measure; period sources put a teacupful anywhere from about a gill (1/2 cup) to 3/4 cup. The boiled rice in the sauce is a thickener; it will break down and give body, so day-old or slightly overcooked rice works best.
- Meat and cutsVeal shoulder or breast, or a whole chicken jointed, both suit the long boil. A bird of roughly four pounds answers the recipe's four pounds of meat on the bone; boneless thigh cut into large pieces needs far less time — 20 minutes total in the broth is plenty.
- Do not throw out the brothThe cooking liquor is the entire sauce base. Skim the fat, keep it hot, and use it for the teacup called for in the curry mixture as well as for covering the meat.
- Total simmeringTwenty minutes in butter and broth, then ten more with the curry mixture, is fine for veal already boiled tender. Watch the pan in the last stage: the flour-and-rice sauce catches easily once it thickens.
- Yield and servingFour pounds of meat serves six to eight. Plain boiled long-grain rice is the intended accompaniment; a squeeze of lemon and chopped coriander at the table are later additions but bring the dish forward.
Curry entered British and American home cookery through the East India Company, and by the time this book was compiled in Toronto in the 1870s it had been thoroughly domesticated: no fresh chillies, no whole spices, no coconut, just a spoonful of ready-made powder from a tin stirred into boiled meat and its broth. Bottled and boxed curry powders had been sold in London since the late eighteenth century, and their turmeric-forward blend is often said to be why Victorian curries were remembered as yellow and mild rather than hot. The use of boiled rice as a thickener, alongside the flour, is a distinctly Anglo touch. That the recipe carries a contributor's name, Miss Beaty, is typical of The Home Cook Book, which was assembled from the household receipts of Canadian women and sold to raise funds for the Hospital for Sick Children.