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Chicken Curry, Madras
Singe, cut head and feet off a tender two-and-a-half-pound chicken, draw, neatly wipe, cut in twelve equal pieces, and lay them on a plate. Mince a large onion, two sound shallots, a medium, seeded green pepper, seedless fresh tomato, bean garlic and a peeled and cored apple. Melt a light tablespoon butter in a sautoire, add chicken and brown on a brisk fire for eight minutes, stirring once in a while, then add minced articles with a tablespoon flour and heavy teaspoon curry powder. Stir well and cook for four minutes longer, moisten with a pint hot water, season with one and a half teaspoons salt, half teaspoon white pepper, saltspoon each grated nutmeg, thyme in powder and bay leaf, and one tablespoon Worcestershire sauce. Thoroughly mix and let slowly cook for thirty minutes, mixing once in a while. Add a boiled rice mix well and cook for ten minutes longer, then keep hot.
Cut two sound onions in rings, lightly roll in flour, then drop in boiling fat for six minutes. Drain on a cloth, sprinkle over a half teaspoon salt, dress chicken on a hot dish, arrange onions around, sprinkle over a chopped, hard-boiled egg, and send to the table with Indian chutney and Bombay duck separately, if at hand.
A turn-of-the-century Anglo-Indian curry written for a professional range, with the compressed shorthand of a chef's notebook. A few of its terms and one of its steps need translating before you cook.
- The hinge: bloom the curry powderThe four minutes of cooking after the flour and curry powder go in, before any liquid, is the step that decides the dish. Commercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty unless it is fried in fat first; skip it and the sauce stays chalky.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wide and shallow with a lid. A 12-inch skillet or a shallow braiser does the same job. You want the chicken in one layer so it browns rather than steams.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a quarter teaspoon each of nutmeg, powdered thyme and bay — the bay is meant as ground bay leaf here, though a single whole leaf fished out at the end is more manageable.
- "Light" and "heavy" measuresA light tablespoon is a scant one, a heavy teaspoon a rounded one. In practice: about 1 tablespoon butter and a good rounded teaspoon of curry powder, which some will find mild by modern taste.
- "Bean garlic"A single clove of garlic; "bean" is used here for a clove-sized piece.
- The riceThe instruction to add boiled rice to the pan and cook ten minutes longer is unusual and will give you a thick, pilaf-like mass. Many cooks today may prefer to hold the rice back and serve the curry over it; if you do follow the original, use rice cooked short of done and add enough sauce that it does not catch.
- Fried onion ringsBoiling fat means deep fat at roughly 350–375F. Six minutes is long for onion rings sliced thin; check at three and pull them when golden, since flour-dusted onion goes bitter once it darkens.
- Bombay duckNot poultry — bombil, a small fish dried hard and salted, sold in Indian groceries. It is grilled or fried briefly and crumbled over the curry. Pungent, and genuinely optional, as the recipe concedes.
- YieldA 2½-pound bird in twelve pieces with a pint of sauce serves four, or three generously. Buy a small chicken and joint it yourself; the recipe's head and feet are a reminder that birds arrived at the kitchen whole.
This is a version of a dish that reached American hotel kitchens by way of the British, not by way of India directly. The tell-tale signs are the apple, the Worcestershire sauce, the flour-thickened gravy and the heavy teaspoon of ready-made curry powder — all hallmarks of the Anglo-Indian curry that British households and clubs standardized through the nineteenth century, and which Victorian cookery writers codified well before it crossed the Atlantic. "Madras" here signals heat and a commercial blend heavy on chili and turmeric rather than any specific South Indian preparation; by 1900 the great port cities lent their names to curry powders sold in tins. The garnish tells the same story: fried onions, chopped hard-boiled egg, chutney and Bombay duck were often served alongside curries at colonial tables, arranged around the dish so diners could help themselves. This was how an American cook of the period met a foreign cuisine, filtered through an imperial intermediary and adjusted for a hotel range.