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Indian Burdwain
(England.) Add to 1 pint cold water, 1 tablespoonful of chopped onion, salt, pepper, a tablespoonful of anchovy sauce, 1 ounce butter mixed with flour, a tablespoonful of tarragon vinegar, and as much Madeira wine, if convenient. Cook until thick, add any cold game or fowl or meat, cut into dice, cook 20 minutes, add the juice of an orange, and serve with a border of rice.
A Victorian club dish for using up cold roast game, thickened with a butter-and-flour paste and sharpened with anchovy, vinegar and orange. Two things need adjusting: the liquid, and the twenty minutes.
- Use stock, not waterA pint of plain water gives a thin, flat sauce. A pint of chicken or game stock would give the sauce more body, though the recipe as written does call for cold water.
- The butter and flour"1 ounce butter mixed with flour" is beurre manié — 2 tablespoons of butter kneaded with roughly the same volume of flour, then whisked into the simmering liquid in small pieces. It will thicken a pint to a light coating sauce, not a gravy.
- Anchovy sauceThis meant a bottled condiment, thin and salty. A teaspoon of anchovy paste plus a splash of Worcestershire is the nearest thing; a mashed anchovy fillet also works. Salt only at the end, after it has gone in.
- Don't cook the meat 20 minutesThe meat is already cooked. Twenty minutes of simmering turns diced cold pheasant, chicken or beef stringy. Reduce and season the sauce first, then add the meat and heat it through for 4 to 5 minutes, no more.
- Orange at the endAdd the juice off the heat and taste. Acid added to a hot, reduced sauce with anchovy in it can tip sharp very quickly; start with half an orange.
- Madeira"As much" most likely means as much as the tarragon vinegar just named. Verlelho suits the savoury sauce better than the sweeter Bual.
- The rice borderPlain boiled long-grain rice, pressed into a ring mould or simply spooned around the edge of a warmed dish with the meat in the centre. Around 1 cup of raw rice serves the quantity here.
- YieldThe sauce takes about 1 lb of diced cooked meat and serves three to four.
Burdwan (spelled here Burdwain) takes its name from Bardhaman in Bengal, and the dish belongs to the Anglo-Indian repertoire that came back to England with returning officials in the nineteenth century. It sits alongside kedgeree and mulligatawny as a British reinterpretation rather than an Indian dish, with no spice at all beyond pepper, the heat and pungency coming instead from anchovy, vinegar and wine. Its function here is thrift: cold game after a shoot, or the last of a roast fowl, diced small and made presentable in a sharp sauce. It is credited to England in a book of dishes gathered abroad.