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Rice with Curry
Skim fat off broth saved from lunch. If less than two quarts add some white broth, let come to a boil, then add three ounces raw rice. Dilute a teaspoon curry powder in tablespoon water and add to soup, mix well, then boil slowly for forty minutes, remove, pour into a soup tureen and serve.
This is a soup, not a rice dish -- a thrift recipe built on yesterday's broth, with rice cooked directly in it to give body. The whole thing hinges on the broth being good and well skimmed, since there is nothing else in the pot.
- Skimming the fatFar easier if the broth has been refrigerated overnight, when the fat sets into a lid you can lift off in one piece. Skimming warm broth with a spoon leaves a greasy soup that curry powder will not disguise.
- "White broth"An unbrowned stock -- veal, chicken or plain water-and-vegetable -- as opposed to brown stock made from roasted bones. A light chicken stock or low-sodium boxed broth stands in without argument.
- QuantitiesAt least two quarts of broth (the recipe tops up to that if short) to three ounces of raw rice, which is a scant half cup. Long-grain white rice is the likely intention; it swells to roughly three times its volume and will give the soup a little body.
- Blooming the curry powderDiluting the powder in a spoon of water before it goes in is the point of that step -- dry powder tipped into liquid clumps and tastes raw. A better result still comes from frying the powder briefly in a little butter first, which takes the dusty edge off the spices.
- The forty minutesToo long for modern rice, which is done in 15 to 18 minutes and by forty will have burst and softened into the broth. If you want distinct grains, simmer 18 minutes. If the long cook is meant to break the rice down and thicken the soup, keep the heat very low and stir so the bottom does not catch.
- SeasoningThe recipe assumes a seasoned broth and adds no salt. Taste at the end; rice absorbs salt as it swells, and a curry soup that tastes flat usually needs salt rather than more curry.
- YieldTwo quarts serves six to eight as a first course. A squeeze of lemon or a spoon of cream at the table cuts the starchiness, though the recipe itself calls for neither.
Curried soups thickened with rice were a fixture of Anglo-American hotel and household cookery by the turn of the twentieth century, arriving through the same channel as mulligatawny -- British Indian cooking filtered through London clubs and then reprinted, endlessly, in American collections. What marks this version is not the curry but the first sentence: it begins with the broth saved from lunch, which may suggest an interest, common in professional cookbooks of the period, in the systematic reuse of stock. A kitchen that regularly boiled meat and bones, as many presumably did, had broth to account for, and a curry powder tin on the shelf turned a thin leftover into something that could be sent out as a course of its own. The commercial curry powders of the era were generally turmeric-heavy blends sold ready-mixed, which is why the recipe treats a teaspoon of "curry powder" as a single fixed ingredient rather than a list of spices.