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Batavia Curry
Cut in quarter-inch squares a small onion, two sound shallots, a seeded each green pepper and red tomato, a peeled and cored apple and one bean sound garlic. Melt a heavy tablespoons butter in a saucepan, add above articles, sprinkle over two tablespoons flour, lightly stir, then add two and a half pounds loin of pork cut in three-quarter-inch-square pieces. Stir all well together and brown for four minutes, stirring well meanwhile. Add a heavy tablespoon curry powder, stir well again and moisten with a pint water. Tie in a bunch a leek, branch each celery and parsley, sprig thyme, bay leaf and clove, and add to pan with rind of half a sound lemon and a half pint fresh or canned peas. Season with a good teaspoon salt and half teaspoon pepper, mix well, cover pan, set in oven for forty-five minutes, then bring to oven door. Add the milk and grated white part of a medium cocoanut, mix well, re-cover pan, reset in oven for twenty-five minutes longer, remove, take up bouquet and lemon rind and dress curry on hot dish. Arrange a rice curry around, sprinkle tablespoon grated ham over and serve.
A Dutch-colonial pork curry from the era when Jakarta was still Batavia. The method is sound; what the original omits is any oven temperature, and it puts several delicate things in far too early.
- Oven temperatureNone is given. Treat it as a moderate oven, 325-350F, in a covered pan on the middle rack. The pork is loin, not shoulder, so anything hotter will squeeze it dry over the seventy minutes of total cooking.
- "One bean sound garlic"A single clove of garlic, peeled and diced with the rest. "Bean" here stands for a clove.
- The coconut is the hinge"The milk and grated white part" means the water inside the nut plus the grated flesh, not canned coconut milk. It goes in only for the final twenty-five minutes because prolonged cooking makes fresh coconut grainy and dulls its perfume. About 1 cup canned unsweetened coconut milk plus 1/2 cup unsweetened shredded coconut is a reasonable substitute.
- Hold back the peasHalf a pint of peas cooked for seventy minutes will be grey and collapsed. Add them with the coconut, or in the last ten minutes if frozen.
- Curry powder wants fat and heatA heavy tablespoon of curry powder stirred into the buttered vegetables should fry for a full minute before the water goes in. Raw curry powder moistened straight away tastes chalky.
- The bouquet and lemon rindTie the leek, celery, parsley, thyme, bay and the single clove in cheesecloth or bind with string so they come out in one piece. Pare the lemon rind in wide strips with no white pith, or the sauce turns bitter over an hour.
- "A rice curry around"A border of plain boiled or steamed long-grain rice, sometimes tinted and seasoned with a little curry powder. Roughly 1 1/2 cups raw rice serves this quantity.
- Grated hamA tablespoon of dry-cured ham grated fine over the top. Prosciutto or a firm country ham grates best when very cold.
- YieldTwo and a half pounds of pork with rice serves five to six generously.
Batavia was the Dutch name for the port that is now Jakarta and the capital of the Dutch East Indies; the city was renamed Jakarta in 1942, and Dutch sovereignty over the colony ended in 1949. A "Batavia curry" in a Western cookbook of this period points to the Indonesian dishes Dutch households brought home, here filtered through a French professional kitchen. The signs of that double filtration are on the page: coconut and curry powder from the Indies, but a flour-thickened base, a tied bouquet of leek, celery, thyme and bay, and a rice border arranged around the dish, all from the classical repertoire. The apple is another marker -- sweet fruit stirred into curried meat was a familiar habit in Dutch and English colonial cooking, though not in Javanese.