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Borneo Curry
Cut the head and feet from a tender chicken of two and a half pounds. Singe, draw and cut it in twelve even pieces. Cut also in one-inch pieces three fresh, skinned mutton kidneys and two ounces lean bacon, and keep on a plate till required. Finely slice a medium carrot, one small onion and a bean of garlic; place in a saucepan with two cloves, one bay leaf, a sprig thyme, one parsley root and one tablespoon butter; lightly brown ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Then add two light tablespoons flour, a tablespoon curry powder and thoroughly mix while cooking two minutes. Moisten with a quart water, add rind of quarter of a lemon, a small sliced apple, two light teaspoons grated cocoanut, two ripe cut-up tomatoes, one and a half teaspoons salt, a half teaspoon white pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Mix until it comes to a boil, let boil for thirty-five minutes, then strain the sauce through a Chinese strainer into a tureen and keep hot. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the chicken, kidney and bacon and lightly brown fifteen minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Add three slices of peeled eggplant, cut in half-inch squares, a small carrot cut in quarter-inch squares, one chopped green pepper and twelve picked, uncooked string beans, and gently brown ten minutes. Pour in the sauce and boil thirty-five minutes. Dress the chicken and all the contents of the pan on a large dish, arrange a rice around the dish as a crown and serve with chutney, separately.
A hotel-kitchen curry in two stages: a strained, thickened sauce and a separately browned mixture of chicken, kidneys and vegetables. The sauce is what carries the dish, so make it first and keep it hot as written.
- The hinge: strain the sauce, then reduce your boilingThe recipe asks for 35 minutes of boiling for the sauce and another 35 after the meat goes in. Modern cut-up chicken will shred to threads in that time; 20-25 minutes of gentle simmering after combining is enough, and the vegetables will still hold their shape.
- Buying the birdA 2.5 lb chicken cut in twelve is a small fryer. Skip the singeing and drawing and buy a cut-up chicken of about that weight, halving the breast and leg pieces to get twelve.
- "A bean of garlic"One clove, not one head. Filippini uses "bean" for a single clove.
- Old measuresA saltspoon is a scant 1/4 teaspoon. "Two light tablespoons flour" means level rather than heaped. A quart of water is 4 cups.
- Chinese strainerA chinois, the conical fine-mesh strainer. A regular fine sieve works; press the solids firmly to get the body of the carrot, apple and tomato into the sauce rather than throwing it away.
- Parsley rootThe pale root of Hamburg parsley, still sold in Eastern European and some farmers' markets. A parsnip section plus the parsley stems is the usual substitute.
- Coconut and curry powder"Grated cocoanut" means fresh or unsweetened dried, never sweetened flake. Cook the curry powder with the flour and butter the full two minutes; raw curry powder simmered into liquid stays dusty.
- KidneysTrim the white core out of the mutton kidneys and soak them briefly in cold water before cutting, or their smell will dominate. Lamb kidneys are the modern equivalent and are milder.
- Yield and the rice crownServes four to six. The "crown" is simply cooked long-grain rice pressed into a ring around the edge of a hot platter with the curry heaped in the centre; a mango or lime chutney goes on the table separately.
Alexander Filippini built The International Cook Book around the idea that a professional kitchen could reproduce the food of anywhere on earth, and the geographic titles in it are best read as menu labels rather than field notes. This is a French-trained cook's curry: a roux thickened with flour, aromatics of carrot, onion, bay, thyme and clove, strained through a chinois, with mutton kidneys and bacon added in a way no Bornean cook would recognise. The apple, coconut and lemon rind belong to the standard Anglo-French curry sauce that had long been established in European hotel kitchens. Borneo itself was divided between Dutch and British spheres in this period, which is likely why the name would have sounded plausibly exotic to a New York reader in 1906 -- and the eggplant, green pepper and string beans do at least gesture toward the vegetable-heavy curries of the Malay archipelago.