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Curry of Sweetbreads
(England.) Cut into dice equal parts of boiled sweetbreads and chicken, mixed with 2 teaspoonfuls of chopped bacon, 2 ounces of butter, an onion, and seasoning. Fry these carefully, add two spoonfuls of curry powder, a tablespoonful of flour, and enough white broth to moisten. Stir and cook 20 minutes, add the juice of a lemon, and serve with a border of rice.
A short Anglo-Indian curry built on two pre-cooked meats, so the actual work is in the sauce. The original assumes you already have poached sweetbreads and cooked chicken on hand.
- Sweetbreads firstVeal sweetbreads (thymus, and sometimes pancreas) need soaking in several changes of cold water until the water runs clear, then a gentle poach of 15-20 minutes in salted water with a squeeze of lemon, then cooling under a weight before the outer membrane is peeled and the meat cut into dice. "Boiled sweetbreads" in the original is shorthand for all of that. They are a special-order item at most butchers.
- Ambiguous spoonfulsThe recipe mixes "teaspoonfuls," "spoonfuls" and "a tablespoonful" without defining them; read the curry powder as roughly two teaspoons to a scant tablespoon and adjust to your blend, which is likely far fresher and hotter than a ready-mixed tin of the period.
- Bloom the powderThe hinge of the dish is adding the curry powder and flour to the hot butter and frying them for a minute or two before any liquid goes in. Raw curry powder stirred into broth tastes dusty and chalky; cooked in fat it turns fragrant and the flour loses its paste flavour.
- White brothA light, unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Use enough to make a sauce that just coats — start with about a cup for a pound of diced meat and add more as it thickens.
- Twenty minutes is for the sauceBoth meats are already cooked, so the simmering time is only to cook out the flour and marry the seasoning. Keep the heat low and stir often; sweetbreads held at a hard boil turn granular, and diced chicken breast dries out. If your sauce tastes finished at ten minutes, stop there.
- Lemon off the heatAdd the juice at the very end, away from the flame. Acid stirred into a hot flour-thickened sauce and then boiled can thin it and dull the spice.
- A border of ricePlain long-grain rice pressed into an oiled ring mould and turned out onto the platter, curry spooned into the centre. A plain ring piped from a mound with the back of a spoon does the same job.
- YieldThe recipe gives no quantity of meat, so any yield is an estimate; the 2 ounces of butter and single onion suggest a dish for about four with the rice.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea collects dishes country by country, and this one is filed under England — curried sweetbreads belong to the English Anglo-Indian repertoire rather than to Indian cooking. Ready-mixed curry powder was being sold in Britain by the late eighteenth century, a fixed blend for cooks who had no intention of grinding masala to order, and by the Victorian period it was common pantry stock used to dress up leftover or delicate meats: cold chicken, rabbit, veal, lobster, and offal like sweetbreads. A rice border is a familiar period presentation for anything in a sauce, and a finish of lemon juice is characteristic of English curry recipes of the era.