Curry is meat, or fish, or indeed any kind of food, served up in a sauce made with curry powder or paste. This paste or powder is usually bought ready-made. It is composed of various spices and colouring matter, and is very hot. Curry is a favourite dish in hot climates, especially India.

Curry Sauce

Take six large onions. Peel them, and slice them, and fry them of a nice brown colour in a frying-pan, using about two ounces of butter. Next, take two sour apples, about the same size as the onions, or rather larger, peel them, cut them up, and carefully remove the core. Add these pieces of apple to the fried onions in the frying-pan, and also a pint of good Stock No. 3.

Let it all simmer till tender; then add a dessertspoonful of Captain White's Curry Paste and a dessertspoonful of curry powder.

Pub the whole through a wire sieve (see No. 21), and if not sufficiently thick, add a little brown thickening. (See No. 12.) Make whatever meat has to be curried hot in this sauce, and, if possible, "warm up two or three bay-leaves (whole) in it, sending the bay-leaves to table in the curry.

If you have no curry paste, you must use an extra quantity of curry powder.

If the curry powder be old and poor, add a teaspoonful of some fresh-powdered coriander seeds; these can be got from any chemist.

When you curry fish you can use fish stock, and less onion. Bay-leaves are always a great improvement made hot in the sauce and kept in it. These should never be forgotten where there is a bay-tree.

Curry sauce can be varied in flavour by adding grated cocoa-nut; and for Indian palates cayenne should be added, as well as chilies served up in it whole.

Boiled rice should always accompany curry, and should be served on a separate dish. This is best on all grounds, including the important one of the remains of the curry and rice being so easily served up again - say, a little left for breakfast.

Meat should be cut up small, the fat not forgotten; or, better still, when possible, the meat or fish shredded. For first-class curry, the meat or fish should be cooked especially for it. Meat warmed up is only a makeshift.