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Nepaul Curry
Cut head and feet from a tender two-pound chicken, entirely bone it and cut meat, liver and heart in half-inch square pieces. Cut also in same shape one ounce lean raw ham, one medium onion, one bean garlic, one chili pepper, one tomato, one apple-cored and peeled-and one medium, seeded green pepper; place all in a bowl. Soak a piece white bread in milk three minutes, press out milk and add to above. Season with one and a half teaspoons salt, two saltspoons cayenne pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, saltspoon dried bay leaf, saltspoon thyme and a heavy teaspoon curry powder; mix all ingredients together, press through a chopping machine, place in a mortar, add two egg yolks and thoroughly pound to a paste. Divide this preparation in six even parts, then roll each piece on a lightly floured table to fine cake forms. Heat two tablespoons lard in a frying pan, place cakes in pan, one beside another, and gently cook ten minutes, remove, dress a rice on a dish, flatten surface to a smooth, round form. Arrange meat on top, pour a curry sauce over all and serve with Indian chutney separately.
This is a hotel-kitchen preparation written for cooks who had a mortar and a grinder on the bench: a boned chicken forcemeat, seasoned as a curry, shaped into cakes and served on a mound of rice. Two components -- the curry sauce and the rice -- are assumed rather than given.
- The hinge: grind, then poundThe paste must be worked past the texture of coarse ground meat, or the cakes crumble in the pan. A food processor does both stages -- pulse the chopped mixture to a fine grind, then run it with the egg yolks until it is genuinely tacky and holds a shape when pressed.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So: 1/2 teaspoon cayenne, 1/4 teaspoon each nutmeg, crumbled bay and thyme. The "heavy teaspoon" of curry powder is a rounded one.
- A bean of garlicOne clove. "Bean" appears to render the French gousse, the word used for a garlic clove and also for a pod.
- Boning the birdA two-pound chicken boned out yields roughly 1 1/4 lb of meat and skin, give or take. Ground chicken thigh in the same weight is a legitimate substitute; keep the ounce of lean ham, which is the only cured element in the mix.
- Heat, not timeTen minutes over gentle heat will not reliably bring a thick poultry cake to 165F. Cook them to that internal temperature, turning once, and finish them in a 350F oven if the outsides colour first.
- The two missing recipesThe author expected you to turn to his own curry sauce and to plain boiled or steamed rice; neither is given here. Any competent curry sauce will carry the dish; make about 1 1/2 cups.
- Heat levelCayenne, a whole chili and a green pepper alongside commercial curry powder make this a hot mixture. Halve the cayenne on a first attempt and check the seasoning by frying a pinch of the paste.
- FatThe recipe calls for two tablespoons of lard, enough for a heavy pan; clarified butter or a neutral oil will serve as well.
- YieldSix cakes -- three modest servings with rice, or six as part of a larger table. Chutney is served in a separate dish, not spooned over.
"Nepaul" is the older English spelling of Nepal, and it turns up on late nineteenth-century menus attached to curries and to a variety of long red chili grown in the Himalayan foothills that reached British and American groceries as "Nepaul pepper" -- often said to be much the same thing as what we now sell as cayenne. The geography of the name is decorative rather than descriptive: nothing in the method is Nepali. What it actually documents is how the professional Franco-American kitchen absorbed curry, treating the spice blend as one more seasoning to be folded into a classical godiveau or forcemeat, pounded in a mortar with egg yolk, shaped into neat cakes and set on a smoothed dome of rice with a sauce poured over. The panade of bread soaked in milk, the ounce of ham for savour, the mortar work -- all of that is standard French charcuterie practice; only the curry powder, the chili and the apple mark it as an Indian dish, and the apple is itself an Anglo-Indian habit rather than an Indian one. Chutney served separately, in its own dish, seems to have been a common finish for a curry in an American hotel dining room of this period, though how general the practice was is harder to say.