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Country Captain
Cut the head and feet off a tender three-pound chicken. Singe, draw and cut it in twelve even pieces. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the chicken and gently fry ten minutes, occasionally turning the pieces. Add one finely sliced onion, one ditto green pepper and a bean sound garlic finely chopped; then brown ten minutes, stirring meanwhile, and moisten with two gills water. Season with a good teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper and one and a half teaspoons curry powder, stir well, then add six finely crushed peeled red tomatoes, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and a saltspoon powdered thyme. Stir well, cover pan, then set in oven forty-five minutes, remove and keep hot. Scald, peel and roast to a nice golden colour a quarter of a pound almonds, add to the chicken with three tablespoons picked dried currants, lightly mix; cook five minutes, dress on a hot dish. Arrange a rice for curry around the chicken. Place six thin slices crisp, freshly broiled bacon over, and serve with Indian chutney, separately, and Bombay ducks if at hand.
An Anglo-Indian chicken curry written for a 1906 kitchen, where a cook was expected to butcher the bird and know what heat "the oven" meant. Both need filling in.
- The birdA three-pound chicken cut in twelve even pieces would typically mean legs and thighs separated, wings jointed, and breast and back each cut across. Any 3-3.5 lb chicken from the butcher, jointed, works; skip the singeing and drawing.
- GillsTwo gills is one cup of water. It should barely cover the bottom of the pan -- the tomatoes supply most of the liquid.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. The thyme is meant as background, not a lead flavour.
- "A bean sound garlic"Filippini's usual formula, with a preposition dropped: a bean-sized piece of sound (unblemished) garlic, roughly one small clove. Modern palates will want two or three.
- Oven heatNone is given. A covered pan of chicken and tomato wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the forty-five minutes; check that the liquid is at a slow simmer rather than a boil.
- Curry powderA teaspoon and a half in a whole chicken is restrained by design -- this is an Anglo-Indian dish filtered through English commercial curry powder. Bloom it in the fat with the onion and pepper for a minute before the liquid goes in, which the original does not say but which markedly improves it.
- Almonds and currantsAdd them only at the end, as written. Five minutes is enough to plump the currants; longer and the toasted almonds go soft, which is the whole point of roasting them.
- "Rice for curry" and Bombay ducksPlain long-grain rice, boiled dry and grainy rather than creamy. Bombay duck is not poultry but dried, salted bummalo fish, sold in Indian groceries and grilled briefly before serving; it is pungent and entirely optional.
- YieldFour generous servings, or six with the rice and bacon counted in.
Country Captain is an Anglo-Indian dish of the port cities -- Madras and Calcutta -- and its name is often said to come from the "country captains" who commanded country ships in the coastal East India trade and were said to have carried the dish, and a taste for curry powder, back to English and American tables, though this is only one of several competing folk explanations; another attaches the name to a captain of country, that is native, troops. It travelled into the American South through the Georgia ports, where Savannah has long claimed it, and by the time Alexander Filippini put it in The International Cook Book in 1906 it was firmly in the repertoire of hotel kitchens that served a curry, a chutney and a rice course as a matter of course. The combination here -- tomato, curry powder, toasted almonds, currants, crisp bacon and chutney served apart -- is one version among many, the almonds and currants varying from cook to cook, more a mild stew with condiments than anything cooked in India, and the Bombay duck at the end is the one ingredient that still marks the dish's origin honestly.