Breakfast: Porridge with leftover Baked Pears
The good thing about steel cut oats is that they reheat more nicely than rolled oats, so I was able to make a big batch of porridge on Sunday morning, and just reheated what was left for Monday's breakfast.
The pears were a nice addition, making this porridge a little sweeter than Sunday's.
Lunch: Sandwiches
Husband and I both had leftover roast beef, cheese, watercress, and horseradish cream in our sandwiches. Daughter had ham, cheese and watercress. Horseradish was a popular accompaniment to roast beef in the Victorian era, just as it is now, but they would have made their own sauce from fresh horseradish. I wasn't able to find any fresh, so we made do with commercial horseradish cream - yum.
Tea: Dried fruit; Walnuts; Apples.
I didn't bake anything for tea this time. As we had quite a few desserts the previous day, I thought we could do with a healthy tea-time snack.
The only real bit of cooking I did today!
I must admit I found it a little surprising how many "Currie" recipes were included in cookery books of the day, but actually I shouldn't have. The British government had taken over direct rule of India in 1857 after all, and later on (in 1877), Queen Victoria was declared "Empress of India". The Queen herself was apparently quite fond of curry.
In Eliza Acton's Modern Cookery there exist quite a number of curry recipes, with the ubiquitous "curry powder" being put into everything from pasta, to oysters, to meat curries that sound a bit more like something that might be eaten today (although certainly not particularly authentically Indian, and with somewhat of a tendency to include fruit). I didn't want to do anything too "normal", because it wouldn't be as fun, but I also didn't particularly want to curry oysters. So I decided on Mr Arnott's Currie, which also conveniently allowed me to reuse the beef shin that I had lifted from the stock on Saturday.
Mmmm, grey and unappealing. But it still had enough flavour in it for this purpose.
Who Mr Arnott may have been, I have no idea, but Eliza had this to say:
"We have already given testimony to the excellence of Mr. Arnott’s currie-powder, but we think the currie itself will be found somewhat too acid for English taste in general, and the proportion of onion and garlic by one-half too much for any but well-seasoned Anglo-Indian palates."
Well, we thought that was hysterical (garlic - gasp!).
Mr Arnott's Currie Powder is comprised of the following spices:
"Turmeric, eight ounces.
Coriander seed, four ounces.
Cummin seed, two ounces.
Fœnugreek seed, two ounces.
Cayenne, half an ounce. (More or less of this last to the taste.)"
It basically calls for grinding the seeds and mixing the lot together. It also includes a handy advertisement for a chemist, "the Messieurs Corbyn & Co", who can grind the spices for you if you consider the process too "troublesome". I did not find it particularly troublesome, but then I made a much smaller quantity. I also added only the tiniest suggestion of cayenne, as Daughter is a bit of a wimp where chilli is concerned.
The Currie itself was truly quite a bizarre recipe, calling for an egg-sized piece of cabbage, two apples, three onions, lemon juice, and "a garlic head the size of a nutmeg" (??) We are then instructed to "put in a fowl that has been roasted and nicely cut up; or a rabbit; or some lean chops of pork or mutton; or a lobster; or the remains of yesterday’s calf’s head; or any thing else you may fancy". I did not fancy a calf's head, or indeed a lobster (!), but I did cut the beef shin up and put that in, as well as some carrot.
And then I served it to my family.
I must say, I fully expected that none of us would like this at all. I thought we'd struggle through enough of it to stop us feeling too hungry, and then throw the rest out, giggling guiltily. But we didn't. Daughter's comment was "It's weird, but I don't hate it". Which summed it up quite well, I think. Definitely weird, and I wouldn't bother making it again, but we actually kind of liked it. Husband and Daughter both claimed the leftovers for lunch the next day too, so they clearly weren't just being polite.
Mr Arnott's claim that this is "an excellent currie, fit for Kings to partake of" may be a bit much, but it really wasn't bad.
For dessert, I decided to have another go at moulding the raspberry jelly. So earlier that day, I melted it down, added some more gelatine, and poured it back into the bundt cake tin. Here is the result:
Still not perfect, especially around the bottom, but so much better than my first effort!
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