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Country Captains
1/2 teaspoonful salt Pieces cold, cooked chicken 1 gill (1/2 cup) milk 1 tablespoonful onion 1 egg juice 3 tablespoonfuls vinegar Cream sauce 1 tablespoonful olive oil 1/4 teaspoonful curry powder Sieve the flour and salt into a basin, add the milk and the egg well beaten, olive oil and the curry powder. Beat until smooth and glossy.
Put in a cool place for one hour.
Mix the onion juice and the vinegar; dip pieces of cold, cooked chicken into the vinegar and onion juice, then into the batter and fry in smoking hot fat until they are a golden color.
Pour cream sauce into the bottom of a hot dish, place the chicken on it and serve hot.
A fritter recipe under a famous name: cold cooked chicken in a curried batter, fried and set on cream sauce. The ingredient list as printed is incomplete, so a little reconstruction is needed before you start.
- Missing flour and saltThe method says to sieve flour and salt into a basin, but neither appears in the ingredient column — a typesetting loss. A batter of this type takes roughly 1 cup flour and 1/2 teaspoon salt to the 1/2 cup milk, one egg and tablespoon of oil, which gives a coating thick enough to cling.
- A gillA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces, as the original helpfully glosses.
- Onion juiceGrate a peeled onion on the fine side of a box grater and press the pulp through a sieve, or pulse it and strain. A tablespoon takes about half a medium onion.
- The vinegar dipThis is the flavouring step, not a marinade — the chicken is dipped and lifted straight into the batter. Leaving it to sit in three tablespoons of vinegar will make the surface wet and the batter slide off.
- Resting the batterThe hour in a cool place lets the flour hydrate and the gluten relax, so the coating fries crisp rather than tough. It is worth keeping.
- Frying temperature"Smoking hot fat" would most likely have been lard or drippings, though the recipe does not say; aim for 360-375F. The chicken is already cooked, so you are only browning the batter — two to three minutes a batch, turning once, and drain on a rack rather than paper so the underside stays crisp.
- Curry powderA quarter teaspoon in a cup of batter is very faint by current tastes. Commercial curry powders of the period were often mild and turmeric-forward, though blends varied a good deal; a teaspoon of a modern blend is probably closer to the effect intended.
- The cream sauceA plain white sauce — about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or half milk and half cream, seasoned. Pour it into the serving dish and set the fritters on top at the last moment, or the coating softens.
- YieldEnough batter for the meat off one roast chicken, serving three or four as a lunch dish.
Country Captain is normally a curried braise of chicken with onion, tomato and currants, long associated with the British India trade — the name is generally traced to the captains of country ships, the vessels working coastal and regional routes in Asia rather than sailing home to England, who are said to have brought the dish and its curry powder into port. It became a fixture in the American South, Savannah and Charleston especially, and later turned up on hotel menus as a genteel curry for people who did not eat curry. This version keeps only the curry powder and the name and turns the whole thing into a fritter — a characteristic move for a period when cold roast chicken was a constant leftover and a batter and a pan of hot fat were one way to make it look like a new dish.