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Curry of Veal, Pondichery
Cut three pounds breast of veal in one-and-a-half-inch-square pieces, place in a saucepan with two quarts water, let come to a boil, then drain on sieve, replace veal in the saucepan, with an onion with two cloves stuck in it, two each carrots and turnips cut in quarters, one branch celery, one bean chopped garlic. Tie in a bunch two leeks, two branches parsley, one bay leaf and a sprig thyme, and add to the pan. Season with teaspoon salt, half teaspoon crushed pepper corn and one saltspoon grated nutmeg. Cover pan and boil one and a half hours. Melt a good tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add one sliced sound apple with a teaspoon curry powder, nicely brown ten minutes, then add one tablespoon flour. Stir well one minute. Strain the veal broth into this pan, mix well and briskly boil fifteen minutes. Remove herbs and all the vegetables from pan, then strain sauce over the veal, lightly mix, cook ten minutes. Pour into a deep dish, arrange rice around the veal and serve.
A French-style white curry: the veal is blanched, simmered in an aromatic broth, and the broth then becomes the curry sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but several of the measures are archaic and the curry step is where the dish is won or lost.
- Brown the curry powder properlyThe apple and curry powder are meant to cook in butter for a full ten minutes over gentle heat until the spice smells nutty rather than dusty. Rushed, the sauce tastes raw and chalky; scorched, it turns bitter and cannot be rescued.
- "One bean chopped garlic"Apparently a size comparison rather than a formal measure: a piece of garlic about the size of a bean, roughly one small clove, finely chopped. It is a seasoning note, not a garlic-forward dish.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. "Half teaspoon crushed pepper corn" means peppercorns cracked coarsely, not ground fine.
- The blanching stepBringing the veal to a boil in two quarts of water and draining it is not wasted work: it removes scum and gives the finished sauce a clean pale colour. The recipe simply says to return the drained veal to the saucepan; it does not specify rinsing, nor how much fresh liquid to add.
- Breast of vealBreast is bony, gelatinous and cheap, and it holds up to ninety minutes of simmering. Boneless veal shoulder cut in the same 1½-inch cubes works and is easier to find; reduce the simmer to about an hour so it does not fall apart.
- The broth becomes the sauceThe recipe does not say how much water the veal is returned to, so the volume of broth is left to the cook. Since only one tablespoon of flour is used, a copious broth should be reduced before it is strained onto the curry roux -- the fifteen-minute brisk boil will not concentrate a large quantity.
- Discard the vegetablesThe onion, carrots, turnips, celery and herb bundle are flavouring only and are removed before serving. The dish that reaches the table is veal, sauce and rice.
- Yield and riceThree pounds of bone-in veal breast will serve perhaps four to six. The recipe says only to arrange rice around the veal; plain boiled rice, drained dry and salted, suits the dish without competing with the sauce.
Pondichéry (now Puducherry) was the principal settlement of French India, held by France from the seventeenth century until 1954. The construction here is pure classical French kitchen: a blanched white meat, a bouquet garni, a butter-and-flour roux, and commercial curry powder bloomed with apple for sweetness and body. That the spice arrives as a single teaspoon of pre-mixed powder, rather than as individually toasted and ground seeds, tells you how curry travelled into European cookbooks: as a product of the colonial trade, standardised and bottled. Its inclusion in "The World's Kitchen" section reflects the early twentieth-century appetite for dishes that gestured abroad while remaining entirely legible to a cook trained in French technique.