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Curried Vegetables
Pare and cut into half-inch dice, sufficient carrots and white turnips to measure one cupful of each; add one-half of a can of peas and one cup of dried flageolet beans (lima or kidney beans may be used instead), soaked over night and parboiled. Brown two tablespoonfuls of butter in a saucepan, add one heaping tablespoonful of flour and brown again. Stir in one pint of stock (water will do) and when thickened add one small teaspoonful of salt, one-quarter of a teaspoonful of pepper, one teaspoonful of curry powder, one-half of a teaspoonful of sugar, one tablespoonful of chopped onion, one and one-half tablespoonfuls of vinegar and the prepared vegetables. Simmer until the latter are tender-about two hours-add one and one-half cupfuls of diced potatoes; simmer for twenty minutes longer and serve in a border of boiled rice.
A brown-roux vegetable curry in the Anglo-Victorian manner, more stew than anything from the subcontinent. The main thing to fix is the timing: two hours of simmering was written for beans that had barely been parboiled.
- The two-hour simmerCarrots and turnips in half-inch dice are done in 15-20 minutes; two hours reduces them to pulp. Cook the soaked beans separately until nearly tender, then build the sauce and give the diced root vegetables 20 minutes in it, adding the potatoes for the last 15.
- FlageoletsSmall pale-green beans of the same species as the kidney bean, picked before full maturity, still sold dried in French groceries and online. A cup dried yields roughly 2.5 cups cooked; canned cannellini or butter beans, drained, substitute directly and skip the soaking entirely.
- Canned peasHalf a standard can is about 3/4 cup. Frozen peas are better here, but stir them in during the final five minutes only, or they will grey out.
- Brown the roux properlyThe butter is browned, then the flour browned again, before any liquid goes in. That takes a good five minutes over medium heat and is where the dish gets its color and its nutty depth; a pale roux gives a thin, floury sauce.
- Curry powder of the periodA teaspoon of commercial curry powder in a pint of stock is very mild by current taste. Period blends were generally turmeric-heavy, with coriander and fenugreek, and milder than most powders sold today. Bloom the powder in the roux for 30 seconds before adding liquid, and season upward if you want more.
- Vinegar and sugarThe 1.5 tablespoons of vinegar and half teaspoon of sugar are the sweet-sour backbone, a fixture of English curries of the era. Use cider or malt vinegar and add the last third off the heat, since long simmering blunts it.
- Stock or waterWater genuinely works because the roux carries the flavor, but the dish is better with vegetable or chicken stock. If using salted stock, hold back on the teaspoon of salt until the end.
- Yield and the rice borderServes four as a main course, six as a side. A "border of boiled rice" means the rice is pressed into a ring mould or shaped with a spoon around the rim of a hot platter, with the curry poured into the well; a simple bed of rice does the same job.
Curried vegetables of this type belong to the British colonial kitchen as it reached American cookbooks at the turn of the century: a flour-thickened brown gravy seasoned with a spoonful of ready-made curry powder, sharpened with vinegar and sweetened slightly, and served with a ring of rice. Commercial curry powders had been sold in Britain since the late eighteenth century and appear to have been a familiar pantry item in the United States by the 1890s, which is why the recipe treats "one teaspoonful of curry powder" as a single self-explanatory ingredient rather than a blend of spices. The presence of canned peas alongside dried flageolets is characteristic of the period's cookery, mixing the new industrial can with beans that still had to be soaked overnight.