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Hindustan Vegetables
Cut off the ends and stalks of twelve very good-sized fresh okras; plunge and keep them in cold water until required. Cut in half and finely slice one medium, white onion and fry it in a tablespoon butter for five minutes, adding half a small, peeled eggplant cut into half-inch-square pieces; lightly mix and cook for six minutes; then add the okras well drained, and one peeled, red, crushed tomato. Season with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon white pepper and half teaspoon curry powder; mix a little. Cover the pan and cook on range for five minutes, then set in the oven for thirty minutes. Remove, pour into a vegetable dish and serve.
A straightforward braised vegetable dish that needs little translation, though the oven is unspecified and the okra handling deserves attention.
- Oven temperatureThe original names no heat. A moderate oven of 350F for the thirty minutes covered is right; the vegetables are already partly cooked and only need to finish and meld.
- Pan choiceUse one pan throughout — a heavy lidded skillet or braiser that can go from burner to oven. "Set in the oven" assumes the same vessel, lid on.
- Okra and sliminessThe original directs cutting off the ends and the stalks. If you want to limit the mucilage, trim only the tough stem end and leave the pods whole. The cold-water soak in the original is for holding, not for treating them — drain them very well, since added water encourages ropiness.
- EggplantHalf a small eggplant is roughly 4 to 6 oz. Modern eggplant is bred less bitter, so salting and draining is optional; skip it if you want the pieces to hold shape.
- The tomatoOne "peeled, red, crushed tomato" means a fresh ripe tomato, skinned and squeezed into pulp. Out of season, about 1/2 cup of canned crushed tomato works, though the dish will be wetter.
- SeasoningA full teaspoon of salt for this quantity is generous by current taste; start with half and adjust. Half a teaspoon of curry powder is a very light hand — the book is aiming at a hint of the flavor rather than an Indian dish.
- YieldServes four as a side. It reheats well.
Recipes like this one show how American and European hotel kitchens of the period handled Indian cooking: a vaguely gestured place-name, a half teaspoon of commercial curry powder, and otherwise a French braise of vegetables in butter. Okra itself came to American kitchens through the Atlantic slave trade from West Africa and was long established in Southern and Creole cooking well before it appeared in cosmopolitan cookbooks under a Hindustan label; the pairing of okra, eggplant and tomato is genuinely common across South Asia, the eastern Mediterranean and the Caribbean alike, which may be why the combination struck a chef as suitably exotic. "Hindustan" was the standard English term of the period for northern India, used loosely for the whole subcontinent, and the curry powders sold then were often blended in Britain rather than India, letting a Western kitchen sign a dish as foreign without changing its technique.