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To Curry Chicken
Mrs. W. Arthurs.
Slice an onion and brown in a little butter; add a spoonful of curry powder; allow it to remain covered for a few minutes to cook; add a little more butter and put in chicken, veal, &c., &c.; cut up small, thicken with a little flour. This is exellent.
A terse nineteenth-century curry: onion, butter, curry powder, meat, flour. The gaps are large enough that the cook is expected to fill them, so here is what the original assumes.
- The hinge: bloom the powderThe instruction to cover the pan for a few minutes after adding the curry powder is the whole point of the recipe. Raw curry powder tastes dusty and slightly bitter; a few minutes in hot butter over low heat rounds it out. Keep the heat gentle so the ground spices toast rather than scorch.
- "A spoonful"An unqualified spoonful in a book of this date most often means a tablespoon, though the recipe leaves it open, as it does the quantity of meat. Domestic curry powders of the period are generally reckoned to have been milder than many commercial blends today; taste and adjust rather than assuming equivalence.
- No liquid is namedThe recipe gives none, but flour added to butter and meat with nothing else produces a paste, not a sauce. Comparable curries of the period usually add stock, milk or water after the flour and simmer until thickened; the amount is left to the cook.
- Cooked or raw meat"Chicken, veal, &c." here may well mean cold cooked meat from an earlier joint, which would need only heating through in the sauce; the recipe does not say. If you start with raw chicken, brown it first and simmer until it reaches 165F.
- Yield and servingThe recipe gives no quantities, so yield depends entirely on how much meat you use. Rice, boiled and drained dry, is the usual accompaniment for curries of this kind; chutney and lemon were often served alongside.
Curry reached North American cookbooks by way of British India and the British kitchen, and by the 1870s curry powder is often said to have been an ordinary pantry item in a middle-class household. Recipes like this one are not attempts at any Indian dish in particular — they are a technique for reviving cold roast meat, in the same family as hash and rissoles, with the powder standing in for a spice cupboard. The Home Cook Book was compiled from contributions by named women, and Mrs. W. Arthurs writes as one cook to another, assuming a reader who already knows the basics and not wasting type saying so. The closing "This is exellent" — misspelling and all — is the characteristic signature of the community cookbook, where the vouching mattered as much as the method.