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Hassani
Cut in half-inch-square pieces one onion, two shallots, half a seeded green pepper, a seeded, fresh red tomato, a peeled and cored apple and a bean of garlic. Melt a heavy tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add the above articles, sprinkle a tablespoon flour over, stir well, then add two pounds raw lean venison cut in three-quarter-inch-square pieces, and stir well with spatula while browning for five minutes. Add a good teaspoon curry powder, teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, saltspoon cayenne, and moisten with a pint and a half water. Tie in a bunch one leek, two branches parsley, one branch chervil, small sprig thyme, clove, and add to the curry with a piece of lemon rind and twenty-four picked, green string beans cut in two. Mix well, cover pan, boil for ten minutes, then set in oven for forty minutes. Remove, take up bunch of herbs and lemon peel. Prepare a rice curry dress it crown-like on a hot dish, pour curry in centre and serve with Indian chutney and Bombay duck, if at hand.
A braised venison curry in the French-hotel idiom: bouquet garni, roux-thickened, finished in the oven and ringed with rice. A few of its measures and one of its garnishes need translating.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So: 3/4 teaspoon white pepper, 1/4 teaspoon each of grated nutmeg and cayenne.
- A bean of garlicA single clove; the phrasing is the sort of French-derived usage common in hotel cookery of the period (French gousse d'ail). One clove for two pounds of meat is restrained by modern taste; two or three will not unbalance the dish.
- Oven heatNo temperature is given. Forty minutes covered after a ten-minute boil points to a moderate oven, 325-350F, hot enough to hold a bare simmer and no more.
- Venison needs longerForty minutes may not tenderise lean venison from the shoulder or leg. Check at the stated time and continue at a slow simmer until the meat yields; add water if the sauce tightens.
- The string beansTwenty-four beans cut in half go in at the start and will be entirely soft by the end. If you want them green, add them for the last ten minutes instead.
- Curry powderCommercial blends were generally milder than modern ones. A teaspoon in two pounds of meat is a whisper; taste and add more. The recipe already adds it to the fat before the liquid, which is the right order.
- Bombay duckNot poultry but bummalo, a small Indian fish salted and dried, usually grilled or fried until brittle and crumbled over the rice. Sold in Indian groceries; strongly pungent, and entirely optional.
- Rice curry, crown-likePlain boiled long-grain rice, seasoned with a little of the curry powder, pressed into a ring mould or shaped by hand into a border with the meat in the well.
- YieldTwo pounds of meat with rice serves four to six.
The name is a puzzle of the sort this book throws up often: Hassani gestures at the Arab or Indian world, but the method underneath is thoroughly French professional cooking of the hotel kitchen -- meat tossed in butter and dusted with flour, a bouquet garni tied with a clove in it, a strip of lemon rind, everything finished in the oven. Curry powder had been sold by British grocers since the late eighteenth century, and on Continental menus a "curry" could mean exactly this: a familiar braise with a spoonful of the yellow tin stirred in, dressed inside a ring of rice and sent out with chutney. The apple is a European curry sweetener rather than an Indian one. Venison places the dish in the game season, and the instruction to serve Bombay duck "if at hand" suggests a cook with a well-stocked kitchen, for whom dried bummalo was a plausible thing to have in a cupboard.