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Left-Over Turkey Indienne
Pick all meat off turkey left over from yesterday, finely slice and keep on a plate till required. Place in saucepan a sliced onion with an ounce butter and fry for five minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Finely slice a good-sized apple, add to onions, with a teaspoon curry powder, stir well and cook for ten minutes, stirring once in a while. Add a tablespoon flour and stir well again. Moisten with three gills broth, add a branch each parsley and chervil, a bay leaf and clove, mix well and cook for fifteen minutes, mixing occasionally. Strain sauce through a strainer into another saucepan, add turkey with a light teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and cook for ten minutes, lightly mixing once in a while. Dilute an egg yolk with two tablespoons cream, the juice of a quarter lemon, add to turkey and mix while heating for two minutes. Dress rice curry on a hot dish crown-like, pour turkey, etc., in centre, sprinkle a little parsley over and serve.
A straightforward curried hash built on a roux-and-apple sauce, finished with an egg-yolk liaison. The measurements are Edwardian but all translate cleanly.
- Do not boil after the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, keep the pan below a simmer and stir for the two minutes given. A boil scrambles the yolk and the sauce breaks into curds and thin liquid.
- Three gills of brothIn American measure a gill is 4 fl oz, half a cup, so this is about 1 1/2 cups (350 ml); on the British imperial gill of 5 fl oz it would be nearer 2 cups. Turkey or chicken stock is the obvious choice; the sauce should coat the meat, not drown it.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne is assertive with only a teaspoon of curry powder behind it — start with half that and adjust at the end.
- Curry powder wants cookingThe ten minutes with onion and apple is the point of the recipe: raw curry powder tastes dusty, and frying it in butter with the apple's sugar rounds it out. Do not shorten this step.
- Straining the sauceThe sauce is strained off the aromatics and the onion-apple pulp before the meat goes in, which gives a smooth, pale gravy. If you would rather keep the body, pull out the bay leaf, clove and herb stalks and blend the rest instead.
- ChervilRarely stocked now. A few extra parsley sprigs with a little tarragon comes close; plain parsley alone is no disaster.
- Rice curry, dressed crown-likeA ring of rice pressed round the edge of a hot platter with the meat in the well. 'Rice curry' probably means the rice served with the curry, though it may mean rice seasoned with curry powder; the recipe does not say. About 1 1/2 cups raw rice would serve four.
- The turkey is already cookedTen minutes in the sauce is to heat it and let it take up flavour, not to cook it. Slice thinly, as directed, and it will not dry out. About 1 lb of picked meat suits this quantity of sauce and serves four.
Dishes labelled à l'indienne in Continental cookbooks of this era rarely have much to do with any Indian kitchen: the marker is commercial curry powder, a flour-thickened velouté and a ring of boiled rice, a formula fixed by French professional practice and carried into English and American hotel cooking. The apple is worth noting — sweet fruit cooked into a curry sauce turns up in both British and French cookery of the period, though the lines of borrowing are less clear than they are often made to sound. That it is built on yesterday's turkey says a good deal about the period: a large household bird was expected to reappear for several days, and the seasoning that made the second and third appearances palatable was frankly borrowed from wherever it could be got.