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Chicken Curry, Curzon
Singe, draw and cut the head and legs off a tender roasting chicken of two and a half pounds. Cut it into twelve even pieces. Heat in a saucepan one heavy tablespoon melted butter, add the chicken and let nicely brown for fifteen minutes, frequently turning the pieces over. Season with a heavy teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and a teaspoon curry powder; mix well, sprinkle a teaspoon flour over, stir lightly. Have one small carrot, half a small turnip, half a small onion, half a green pepper, one branch white celery, one peeled and cored apple and one bean sound garlic. Cut all these articles into small julienne-shaped strips and add to the chicken. Moisten with a pint hot water, mix well and let boil for five minutes. Tie in a bunch one branch parsley, one branch chervil, half sprig thyme, one of bay leaf and a clove; add to the pan, cover it and let slowly cook for fifteen minutes. Peel and finely crush a good-sized, sound red tomato, one ounce fresh cocoanut very finely shredded, with half gill of the milk, and add to the chicken; mix a little and set in the oven for twenty minutes. Remove and keep at the oven door. Prepare a rice for curries. Arrange it as a border around the dish. Remove the bunch of herbs, pour the chicken into the centre of the rice and serve.
A French-trained kitchen's idea of an Indian curry: chicken browned in butter, a julienne of vegetables and apple, a bouquet garni, and coconut milk to finish. It works, but the language and a few quantities need translating.
- Buying the birdSkip the singeing and drawing and buy a 2 1/2 lb chicken, cut into 12 pieces (each breast in three, each thigh in two, drumsticks and wings whole). A bird that small is now sold as a small fryer; a 3 lb chicken cut into 12 behaves the same way.
- "A bean sound garlic"One clove, sound meaning unblemished and not sprouting. "Heavy" before a spoon measure is usually taken to mean rounded rather than level, so the salt can be read as roughly 1 1/2 teaspoons; safer to start lower and adjust at the end.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup of coconut milk. The ounce of fresh shredded coconut plus that liquid can be replaced by 1/3 cup canned coconut milk and 2 tablespoons unsweetened desiccated coconut.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. A moderate oven, around 350F, for the final twenty minutes will do; the pan is already at a simmer and only needs to hold there. The recipe does not say whether the pan is covered for this stage.
- The curry powderOne teaspoon in a whole chicken is a period-appropriate whisper. Stir it into the hot butter with the chicken for thirty seconds before the flour goes in so the spices bloom rather than taste raw, and add more to taste if you want it to register.
- Total cooking timeFive minutes at a boil, fifteen covered on the stove, twenty in the oven: about forty minutes of moist cooking after browning. Breast pieces will be dry by then. Lift them out when they reach 165F and return them to the pan for the last few minutes.
- "A rice for curries"Filippini gives a rice for curries as a separate recipe elsewhere in the book; consult it for his method. Any well-drained basmati or long-grain rice packed into a ring around the platter does the job.
- YieldFour servings with the rice border.
The International Cook Book (1906) was assembled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its curries are Anglo-Indian rather than Indian: butter instead of ghee, a bouquet garni of parsley, chervil, thyme and bay, a julienne cut, and a commercial curry powder standing in for a spice mix ground at home. The apple and coconut are the signature of that hybrid style, which spread through British and American hotel kitchens in the nineteenth century as a way of making a curry legible to diners raised on French sauces. The name may well be a compliment to George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 and very much in the newspapers when this book was compiled, though that is inference from the date alone and Filippini says nothing about it; naming dishes for statesmen and titled patrons was standard practice in restaurant kitchens of the period and rarely implied the person had eaten the thing.