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Kofta Curry
Pick off all the meat from the roast beef left over from yesterday, mince finely, and keep in a large bowl. Chop very finely one medium onion, one bean sound garlic, enough parsley to make one teaspoon, one ripe tomato, half a seedless green pepper, adding a tablespoon good curry powder, and place all these articles with the beef. Season with a teaspoon salt, half a teaspoon pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, a saltspoon thyme and a saltspoon bay leaf. Crack in a fresh egg, pour in also a half gill cream. Knead the whole well together until thoroughly mixed. Divide the preparation into twelve even pieces. Sprinkle a very little flour over and give them a nice cake form. Have in a sautoire four tablespoons very hot fat, drop in the cakes and fry for seven minutes on each side. Melt half tablespoon butter in a saucepan, add a tablespoon flour, stir for one minute, moisten with two gills hot broth. Season with a teaspoon curry powder, half a teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; add a piece lemon rind, one very small crushed tomato, one finely chopped shallot, one bean crushed garlic, a sprig each bay leaf and thyme. Mix well, and boil for twenty minutes. Place boiled rice on a large dish, crown-like, arrange the meat cakes in the centre, strain the sauce over and serve.
A leftover-beef rissole in a curry gravy, written in the Delmonico's shorthand of its day. Two things need attention: the archaic measures, and a frying time that will dry out meat which is already cooked.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the half gill of cream is 1/4 cup and the two gills of broth for the sauce is one cup. A saltspoon is 1/4 teaspoon.
- "One bean garlic"This means one clove. Two cloves total across the cakes and the sauce.
- Frying timeSeven minutes a side is far too long for patties of already-roasted beef bound with egg. Three to four minutes a side over medium-high heat browns the crust and heats them through; longer and they turn dry and crumbly.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan. Any heavy skillet wide enough to hold twelve cakes without crowding will do; fry in two batches rather than steaming them together.
- BindingIf the mixture will not take a cake shape after kneading, add a spoonful of fine dry breadcrumbs rather than more egg, which makes the cakes rubbery.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of this period were generally mild and turmeric-heavy British blends. A tablespoon of a modern Madras powder is likely to be considerably hotter; taste and adjust, and cook the teaspoon in the sauce for a minute at the roux stage so the raw spice flavour goes.
- The sauceTwenty minutes of boiling on a cup of broth will reduce it hard. Simmer rather than boil, keep it covered, and strain as directed — the lemon rind, bay, thyme and garlic are there for flavour, not texture.
- YieldTwelve cakes, enough for four as a main course with the ring of rice.
Kofta comes from the Persian kūfta, from a verb meaning to pound or beat — the meat is worked to a paste rather than chopped, and the word travelled with Persian cooking into Turkish, Arabic and, through the Mughal court, into the kitchens of northern India. What appears here is the Anglo-Indian descendant of that dish: meatballs in a curry gravy, filtered through the British Raj and then through a New York hotel kitchen, where curry powder was a jar on the shelf and the koftas have become flat fried cakes served in a crown of rice, a plating convention of the period. The instruction to begin with "the roast beef left over from yesterday" places it squarely in the economy tradition of the big American cookbooks of the 1900s, which devoted long chapters to rehabilitating cold joints; the curry was as much a way of making yesterday's meat interesting as it was an act of culinary tourism.