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Potatoes, Indienne
Heat in a saucepan one tablespoon butter, add one finely chopped onion and brown for five minutes, then add one teaspoon curry powder; stir briskly and moisten with a pint water. Season with a teaspoon salt, add twelve small, peeled, well-washed pototoes, cover the pan and boil for thirty-five minutes, remove and serve.
A plain curried potato braise from the era when "Indienne" on a menu meant little more than a spoonful of curry powder. It works, but a few details need translating.
- The hinge: fry the curry powderThe instruction to add the powder to the hot butter and "stir briskly" before the water goes in is the whole point of the dish. Twenty to thirty seconds in fat drives off the raw, dusty note of the spice blend; dumping it into water instead leaves the sauce tasting chalky.
- Twelve small potatoesRead this as roughly 1 to 1 1/2 lb of new or waxy potatoes about 1 1/2 to 2 inches across, all of a size so they cook evenly. Waxy varieties hold together through a long simmer; floury bakers will collapse into the liquid.
- A pint of waterAn American pint, 2 cups. It should come partway up the potatoes rather than drown them, so use a pan narrow enough that they sit in one snug layer.
- Thirty-five minutes is longSmall waxy potatoes are tender in 18 to 25 minutes at a bare simmer. Check with a knife tip at 20 minutes; the extra time may simply reflect a looser idea of doneness.
- "Boil" means simmerA hard boil will knock the potatoes apart and reduce the liquid to nothing before they are cooked through. Keep it at a lazy bubble, lid on.
- SaltA full teaspoon in 2 cups of water is reasonable for potatoes, which absorb very little, but taste the sauce at the end rather than at the start.
- Curry powderCommercial blends of the period were mild and turmeric-forward. A modern Madras-style powder is considerably hotter, so start with a level teaspoon and add more after frying if the aroma seems thin.
- Yield and servingServes four as a side dish. The cooking liquid does not thicken on its own; either reduce it uncovered for a few minutes at the end or serve the potatoes with the broth spooned over, alongside rice or a plain roast.
"A l'indienne" was one of the standard garnish-names of the French professional kitchen, and in practice it signalled curry powder and often rice rather than anything traceable to a particular Indian dish. Curry powder itself was a British-Indian commercial invention, a ready-mixed masala sold to households that wanted the flavour without the spice cupboard, and by the time this book was compiled it had passed into French and American cookery as a single ingredient with a single name. That is why the recipe calls for one teaspoon of "curry powder" and nothing else: no cumin, no coriander, no chilli listed separately. It gave a home cook a way to put something faintly exotic on the table using an onion, a potato and a tin from the grocer.