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Hong Kong Chicken Okra
Cut into small dice pieces half a boned tender fowl, one sound green pepper, two leeks, one white medium onion, one ounce raw, lean bacon, place in a saucepan with one tablespoon melted butter and gently brown for ten minutes, turning quite frequently meanwhile; add one tablespoon curry powder, stir well, and moisten with three quarts water. Add the uncut half, with the bones and two peeled, crushed tomatoes, cover the pan and let boil for thirty minutes. Season with a tablespoon salt and half a teaspoon white pepper, add two ounces raw rice, three thin slices peeled eggplant cut into small dice pieces, one small peeled and cored apple cut the same way, and twelve small, well-trimmed fresh okras cut into small pieces. Mix a little and then boil rather slowly for thirty minutes longer. Then add the milk and shredded white of a medium, sound cocoanut, mix well and slowly boil for fifteen minutes more. Remove, lift up the half fowl and bones, skim off the fat from the surface, pour the soup into a soup tureen and serve.
A curried chicken soup in the mulligatawny family, thickened three ways — okra, rice and coconut. It makes a great deal of soup, and a few of the quantities need a second look before you start.
- YieldThree quarts of water, plus a whole fowl, rice, vegetables and coconut, yields roughly three quarts of finished soup after the long boil — enough for 10 to 12 as a first course. Halving the recipe works cleanly if you use a small chicken.
- A "tender fowl"A fowl was a mature bird — tougher and far more flavourful than a modern broiler, which is why it can stand 75 minutes of boiling. Use a 3 1/2 to 4 lb chicken: bone and dice one half, and drop the other half in whole with its bones as the stock base, exactly as written.
- SaltA full tablespoon of salt is defensible for three quarts, but the bacon and the long reduction add their own. Start with half, and correct at the end once the coconut is in.
- Coconut milk"The milk and shredded white of a medium cocoanut" most likely means the water inside the nut plus the grated flesh, which is far leaner than canned coconut milk. A can of unsweetened coconut milk, thinned with water, plus a handful of unsweetened shredded coconut, is the nearest practical substitute; canned coconut is prone to separating, so keep the final 15 minutes at a bare simmer.
- Bloom the curry powderThe tablespoon of curry goes in with the browned vegetables and bacon before any liquid, and the instruction to "stir well" is the hinge of the dish. Give it 30 to 60 seconds in the fat over moderate heat; skipping this leaves a raw, dusty edge that no amount of simmering removes.
- Ambiguous measures"Three thin slices peeled eggplant" depends entirely on the eggplant — reckon on about a cup of small dice. Two ounces of raw rice is a scant 1/3 cup; over the 45 minutes it spends in the pot it will largely disintegrate, which appears to be part of the thickening.
- OkraCut and simmered for 45 minutes, the okra will break down and give the soup body rather than staying in distinct pieces. If you want any texture from it, hold back a third and add it in the last ten minutes.
- FinishingRemoving the half fowl and bones and skimming the fat matters here — bacon, butter and chicken skin over 75 minutes leave a considerable slick. The picked meat from the reserved half is worth shredding back into the tureen rather than discarding.
This belongs to the long line of curried Anglo-Indian soups that spread through European and American hotel kitchens in the nineteenth century, of which mulligatawny is the best known: chicken, curry powder, rice, apple and coconut, simmered into something between a soup and a stew. The apple and the coconut are the tells — both were common in British colonial curry cookery as a sweet counterweight to the spice. The "Hong Kong" of the title reads as a dining-room flourish rather than a provenance; far-eastern place names were often attached to dishes on the strength of curry powder alone, and okra points west, to the American South and the Caribbean, rather than to China. Filippini's International Cook Book assembled hundreds of such dishes under geographic labels — a professional chef's survey of what a well-travelled palate was expected to recognise.