Victorian Curry: What the Old English Cookbooks Put in the Pot

I cook a lot of curry at work, with Sri Lankan chefs, so I wanted to see what curry looked like when it first turned up in English kitchens. I went through every curry recipe in the old English cookbooks I have, from Eliza Acton and Mrs Beeton to a waiter from Ceylon who wrote a little curry book for English cooks in 1889.

The English version is easy to picture. Onions and a sour apple fried in butter, a spoon of shop curry powder rubbed into flour, stock, then cream and lemon at the end, with the rice piled round the edge. The cooks who had learned their curry in India and Ceylon did almost none of that, and some of them said so.

Mrs Beeton’s Curried Fowl, 1861

Her recipe is the clearest picture of a Victorian curry I found. For three or four people:

• 1 chicken, cut into joints
• 2 oz butter and 3 sliced onions
• 1 apple, peeled, cored and minced
• 1 pint of white veal stock
• 1 tablespoon of curry powder and 1 of flour
• 4 tablespoons of cream and 1 of lemon juice

The chicken, onions and apple are fried pale brown, the stock goes in for 20 minutes, then the powder and flour are rubbed smooth with a little of the gravy and stirred in, and it simmers for another half hour or so. The hot cream and lemon go in just before serving. She serves it with rice “heaped lightly on a dish by itself, or put round the curry as a border”, and says it can be made with cold chicken, though fresh is better. It cost 3s 3d and was in season in winter.

Apple, Flour and Cream

Apple is the giveaway. Mrs Beeton puts it in four of her curries, and Mrs Marshall puts sour apples in nearly every curry in her 1890 cookery book. Acton adds acid apples, green gooseberries, cucumber and vegetable marrow. Flour thickens almost every English curry, and cream finishes a lot of them.

The Indian Cookery Book, printed in Calcutta in 1869 for European households in India, has no flour in its curries at all, and says that “the introduction of vegetable into any meat curry is objectionable”, because the vegetables let out water. Daniel Santiagoe uses apple only in his chutney, and thickens his curries with rice browned in a dry pan and ground fine.

A flour roux is still how my Japanese potato curry gets its thick sauce, and the other ways I thicken a curry are in why is my curry too thin.

Shop-Bought Curry Powder

Mrs Beeton gives a home-made powder, a quarter pound each of coriander and turmeric with fenugreek, mustard, ginger, allspice and cayenne, then admits that shop powder is “generally speaking, far superior”. Mrs Marshall gives no powder at all: every recipe asks for Marshall’s curry powder, which she sold. Charles Francatelli, chief cook to Queen Victoria, used a bought powder and a bottled paste as well, and kept his quick curry sauce for “cases of emergency or necessity”.

Wyvern, the pen name of an English army officer writing in Madras in 1885, saw it the other way. He wanted the powder made in a big batch and bottled, because “curry-powders improve by keeping”, and blamed the habit of letting the cook make it fresh every day. In the same chapter he still recommends a Madras shop powder.

Too Much Turmeric

The line that surprised me most is Acton’s. In England, she writes, “turmeric and cayenne pepper prevail in them often far too powerfully”, and a curry “ought to be of a dark green, rather than of a red or yellow hue”. The fresh green things that make an Indian curry were the part English cooks could not get.

So I worked out how much of each powder is turmeric, by weight, where the book gives every amount:

Powder	Year	Turmeric by weight
A Madras cook’s powder, printed by Daniel Santiagoe	1889	about 3%
Curry paste, The Indian Cookery Book, Calcutta	1869	about 6%
Wyvern’s household powder, Madras (seeds and roots as bought)	1885	about 19%
Eliza Acton, Bengal currie powder	1882 edition	about 20%
Mrs Beeton, Indian curry powder	1861	about 27%
Eliza Acton, Mr Arnott’s currie powder	1882 edition	about 48%

Acton prints Mr Arnott’s powder, eight ounces of turmeric in sixteen and a half, then says in a footnote she would use less turmeric and more coriander, “but we have not tried it”. Santiagoe never uses the word turmeric at all. In his book the yellow spice is “saffron”, a saltspoon of it for a pound of meat.

What the Cooks from India and Ceylon Said

Daniel Santiagoe was the son of a butler from Trichinopoly and Colombo, and worked as a waiter at the Ceylon Tea House at the Liverpool exhibition in 1887 and the Glasgow one in 1888. His Curry Cook’s Assistant was written to show English cooks how to make curries “in their original style”. His advice:

• Buy the spices separately, because a mixed powder “will taste everything too much”.
• “Several cooks add too much ghee or butter, lard, etc., but it only spoils the taste of the Curry.”
• In Ceylon no vegetable curry is made without Maldive fish, so in England he adds a spoonful of chopped ham or corned beef instead.
• Tinned grated coconut from London is fine in a brown curry, but “it is a new idea, not suitable or used in the East”.
• In Ceylon two curries go with the rice, a brown one and a yellow one.

He calls mulligatawny by its Tamil name, mollagoo tanney, pepper water, and asks in a footnote: “Why English people always spell this word wrong?”

The Indian Cookery Book says coriander and cumin “must on no account be put into malay curries, or the delicate flavour of the cocoanut will be destroyed”, and that a proper kurma is “quite unsuited to European taste”, so it gives a milder one as well. Wyvern remembered the curry served at sea, which a friend called “yellow Irish stew”. He wanted only young chickens, never big ones, and the coconut milk stirred in last, because “If put in too soon, the value of the nutty juice will be lost”. For the sweet and sour note he liked red currant jelly best.

Where the English Kitchen Won

Mulligatawny started as pepper water eaten with a lot of rice. Wyvern says the English added chicken and mutton and “thickened the liquid with flour and butter”, and by his day he thought the best mulligatawny was made in England, because it was built “upon a really strong foundation in the shape of stock, an important point that most Indian cooks slur over”.

Rice, Every Grain Separate

Nearly every one of these books gives the rice its own method, and they all want each grain apart. Acton sends it in a separate dish, and “it should be first helped, and the currie laid upon it”. Mrs Beeton heaps it or makes a border. Wyvern had no time for English rice: “A sodden mass of ‘stodgy’ rice as dressed by Mary Jane in England is a thing unknown to the Anglo-Indian Exile.”

A Way to Use Up the Roast

A lot of English curry was leftovers. Mrs Beeton’s curries of beef, mutton, veal and chicken sit in her cold meat cookery, made from the remains of a roast. The amounts were small too: Escoffier in 1907 puts “a pinch of powdered curry” into two pounds of mutton, and Fannie Farmer in Boston in 1896 one tablespoon into a whole chicken.

What I Take From Them

At work the Sri Lankan chefs I cook with fry the whole spices in oil first, use curry leaves and roasted curry powder, and put the coconut milk in at the end, just as Wyvern wanted. A lot of what is in these old books is familiar to me, it has just been improved since. And I will not knock the old British curry either: a light, mild one is nice.

Curry reached Japan by way of England, and my Japanese potato curry still thickens with flour, just as Mrs Beeton’s did. My beef madras, chickpea and sweet potato madras and Sri Lankan palak dal are all cooked closer to the way we do it at work than to Mrs Beeton. There are more in my 13 curry recipes from around the world, I compared six spice blends the same way in Jamaican curry powder, and the same kind of look back at a Polish dish is how bigos changed.

The Old Cookbooks

• Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families, first published 1845 (I read the 1882 edition)
• Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management, 1861
• The Indian Cookery Book, Calcutta, 1869
• A. R. Kenney-Herbert (Wyvern), Culinary Jottings for Madras, 1885 edition
• Charles Elmé Francatelli, The Modern Cook, 1886 edition
• Daniel Santiagoe, The Curry Cook’s Assistant, 1889 edition
• Mrs A. B. Marshall, Mrs A. B. Marshall’s Cookery Book, 1890
• Fannie Merritt Farmer, The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, 1896
• Auguste Escoffier, A Guide to Modern Cookery, 1907

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