“to curry after the Indian manner”
As I said in an earlier post, this recipe was disappointing. The chicken was nice cold and would make a nice addition to a summer platter of cold meats. I’d make it using chicken fillets, I suspect (the recipe calls for a whole chicken, cut into peices). I would reserve the sauce and use it to make a side dish of hot rice, but I would reduce the butter by nearly 50%. When I steamed the sauce with rice, I could taste the spices that were so sadly pale in the chicken.
As it stands, “after the Indian manner” in this case means a bit of cayenne, a bit more galingale and lots of rice flour. It’s a delicate dish and we’re all too used to more robust curries.
Retrospectively, I think Nicole and I judged it a bit harshly on the night because the recipe was called a curry, so we were expecting something less fragile. This is one recipe where modern Australian tastes have definitely moved in a different direction. I need to keep an eye on other English curries from that period, to find out if this curry is typical or an exception. That’s the wonder of testing things - it’s only when you taste the food that you get a real sense of what’s happening at a given time and in a given place. I’m rather hoping that Austen’s circle was so sheltered they had a different version of curry to those made by London families or families with strong links to India, but this is hope and needs testing. If I find more curry recipes that fit the menu overall, rest assured they will be listed for testing.
English curry is my food story for Wednesday. Look at the paths curry has traced through the world and how it has grown and changed. The chicken curried “after the Indian manner” is just one step in a very complicated trail that goes back long before the introduction of the chilli into Indian cuisine. Think of the early nineteenth century curry as a chapter in the curry’s long, long story.
November 1st, 2006 at 7:04 pm
I’m glad I’m reading this around dinner time because it’s really made me hungry!! I love curry and I wish I knew how to cook Indian food properly. I made Palak Paneer using cheese curds and a can of spinach (from the Indian food aisle in the grocery store), but gosh darn it if it just didn’t taste the same!