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October 7
Menu: Carrot Soup; Indian Dry Curry; Boiled Rice Spinach; Cabbage Salad; Pineapple, Bavarian Cream; Coffee Indian Dry Curry-2 pounds beef, 4 tablespoons Crisco, 1 onion, 2 tablespoons curry powder, 2 chopped gherkins, 1 dessertspoon chutney, 1 saltspoon salt, juice of 1½ a lemon, and 12 pint thin brown sauce or gravy. Melt Crisco in stewpan, put in onion (sliced), and fry for a few minutes. Then add meat, cut in small pieces, and fry all together for about 10 minutes. Now sprinkle curry over meat, and stir contents of saucepan over fire for another 5 minutes. The gherkins, chutney and salt must now be added; also sauce or gravy; and stewpan must be set over very slow fire about 1 hour; by that time meat should be quite tender. Add lemon juice, and dish up. Serve with plainly boiled rice.
A straightforward braised curry in the Anglo-Indian style, built on Crisco because the book exists to sell it. Butter, ghee or a neutral oil all work in the same quantity.
- The hinge: low and slowEverything after the gravy goes in depends on holding the pan at a bare tremble for the full hour. A visible simmer will tighten 2 lb of stewing beef rather than soften it, and the sauce will reduce to paste before the meat gives.
- Cut of beefSmall pieces of chuck, shin or blade are what this needs. Lean steak cut small and stewed an hour turns dry, and the recipe gives no fat to spare beyond the four tablespoons used for frying.
- Liquid quantityThe printed "12 pint" of thin brown sauce is almost certainly half a pint, about one cup. That is the right order of magnitude for two pounds of meat in a covered pan; add a splash more if the pan runs dry.
- LemonThe juice reads as half a lemon, added at the very end, just before dishing up, so the acidity stays bright. Stirring it in early and cooking it an hour flattens it entirely.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder blends vary a great deal, then as now, so taste yours; two tablespoons of a hot blend may be more than you want, and the frying step in step three is there to cook off the raw spice, so give it the full five minutes.
- Saltspoon and dessertspoonA saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, a dessertspoon about two teaspoons. Salt again at the end, since the half pint of brown sauce or stock carries its own.
- YieldTwo pounds of beef with rice serves four to six.
The Story of Crisco (1913) was published by Procter & Gamble to teach American cooks what to do with a hydrogenated vegetable shortening that had no culinary tradition behind it, and its "Calendar of Dinners" quietly recruited established dishes to the cause. This curry is not Indian so much as Anglo-Indian by way of the British domestic manuals of the previous century: the gherkins, the bottled chutney, the brown sauce and the lemon are all the vocabulary of an English kitchen adapting a curry powder blended for export. "Dry" here distinguishes it from the soupier curries served in gravy, though after an hour under a lid it is closer to a thick stew than genuinely dry. The substitution the book cares about is the fat: where an English cook of the period would have reached for butter, dripping or ghee, Crisco is offered as the neutral, shelf-stable alternative.