Hello welcome to 18th century cooking my name is Ryan Kerr
today we're working on a recipe that's a little bit different for the channel
it's a chicken curry right out of the 18th century and I think it's going to be delicious
thank you for joining me today as we savor the flavors and the aromas of the 18th century
Sometimes when you're going through 18th century cookbooks you want something to jump off the page
and grab you and it doesn't always happen whether it's because everything feels like it's a version
of something that you've done before maybe that day you're just not in the right headspace to
look for recipes there were a couple people on the crew that offered to help they said
hey I could do this sometime so I decided to take him up on it and Caleb found this really
really neat recipe for Indian curry we've never done that before so I thought okay that's it let's
give it a try that's what brings us here and it's interesting because now as a family you know each
individual person probably lives in close enough proximity in the u.s to find good Indian food or
at least Indian food in the 18th century they they couldn't just go to a restaurant and order it so
they needed to be able to make it at home so that's what's cool about this recipe is it's
an English cookbook and they're trying to say I want to have something exotic I want
to experience flavor profiles that I'm not used to and this is this is an English person
that's taking an Indian curry recipe putting it in her cookbook probably putting her own spin on
it I'm not really sure it'd be really neat to find an actual Indian curry recipe from the time period
in India but we haven't come across that so this is the best we can do and I think it's
a really good try this recipe comes from Hannah Glass's "The Art of Cookery" we've used this book
a ton if you're looking for a cookbook that gets you into 18th century cooking really easily
this is the one buy it it's fun all right so this is "to make curry the Indian way take two small
chickens skin them and cut them as for a fricassee wash them clean and stew them in about a quart
of water for about five minutes then strain off the liquor and put the chickens in a clean dish
take three large onions chop them small and fry them on about two ounces of butter
then put in the chicken and fry them together until they are brown take a quarter of an ounce of
turmeric and a large spoonful of ginger and beaten pepper together and a little salt to your palate
strew them all the ingredients over the chicken whilst it is frying then pour in your liquor and
let it stew about half an hour then put in a quarter of a pint of cream and the juice
of two lemons and serve it up the ginger pepper and turmeric must be beaten very fine" that's it
it's a pretty simple recipe what we need to do for this is to break down this chicken that
calls for two whole chickens our chickens are larger than they were in the time period I did
get the smallest one that I could find but it's still a sizable chicken so we're gonna go through
the steps to break this down real quick then we'll get it all cut up small and get cooking
I've broken down the chicken it's ready to go for this particular recipe I'm not going
to worry about the wings put those aside you can use them for something else obviously everything
that you discard it's good for chicken stock don't waste it make some stock it's delicious
right now I've got the breasts and the legs so we've got white meat we've got dark meat
I'm going to go ahead and get the meat off of the legs and we're going to cut everything up small
so they can go in the skillet and just turn into well what they call as a fricassee but
really you just want small chunks of chicken
get the chicken all chopped up here it's in small pieces now what the recipe calls for is
for us to put this in about a quart water for about five minutes and really what we're doing
there is we're starting a broth we're making a quick broth we're gonna pour that off later
and store it to the side until the end of the recipe but right now we just got to get it hot
our chicken is in there stewing away it's gonna be in there for about five minutes in the meantime we
can go ahead and get our onions ready so the one thing I like about this recipe is that I love food
that has a lot of spices and there are different recipes that we've done on the channel that have
made me really happy kitchen pepper was one of them at one time we did a recipe called pepper pot
and that was a Caribbean take that an English cookbook had if I remember right it was English
at any rate people are trying to experience these highly spiced foods and I think that
oftentimes in when we think about 18th century not only do we think of all the clothing being
kind of brown or green kind of earthen tones but we also think that people were boring and that
they didn't like spice and they didn't like a lot of things that they in fact did like when we were
at Mount Vernon when we did the fried catfish recipe there was a ton of cayenne pepper in that
people liked that people like high spiced foods foods that just kind of reach you out and slap
you when before you eat them because that's fun and you're just like really experiencing all
these different things and it's making your taste buds go oh yeah there's something happening here
all right so we just strained the liquid off of the chicken it's staying in the bowl back there
and that's going to be used later in the recipe right now we need to get some butter and onions
in this pan start frying it up then we'll add the chicken and the spices it's going to be great
so what's interesting here is that I wouldn't think that just five minutes of that chicken
in the water would create such a rich looking broth already but this is you can already see
the oils in here you can see it working and then we're going to put this back in later so it gets
the stew in that for another half hour so we're creating quite a complex broth that we're going
to add heavy cream and spices to so this thing should be full of flavor I'm really excited
I was really surprised when I added all the spices in there and start stirring
and that color popped that turmeric and ginger just turned everything like a
yellowish oranges kind of thing looks a lot like curry that I know today so I'm really excited
about this I think it's going to work out really well the room is just filling with the aromatics
of all that it smells so good in here then i poured in the broth that's going to stew for
about a half hour then we'll get the cream and the lemon juice in there and it'll be ready to go
in the meantime we're going to make some rice the rice recipe that followed this recipe in
the cookbook was just basically cook some rice once we get the rice finished we'll get that
in the bottom of a bowl the curry is going to go right on top of this and I cannot wait to try it
this smells incredible we got the rice finished up we've got a little
bit of rice in here on the bottom and the curry on top all of the aromatic notes
are really really great I hope that it tastes as good as it smells
that's good that's really good and I was afraid that the chicken was going to overcook
but it's super tender it's really really good sometimes when they do this scenario where some
meat is twice cooked then it can get tough but this is perfect the stewed in there a
long time tastes really good the ginger isn't popping out nearly as much as I thought that
it would we could add a little bit more give a little bit more kick I put plenty of black
pepper in there the lemon is what gets you and that along with the cream is kind of unfamiliar
usually you think cream and you think heavy but this doesn't eat super heavy the lemon aromatics
come through right away and uh I don't know it's just there's something comforting about
it it's really good so growing up in the midwest a lot of times when I think about
Indian food and people around me think about Indian food they automatically think spicy
this is not spicy it's just very full and the ginger doesn't give you a hot note
but it's there I don't I can't pick out the tumeric but I think that I think that the
spices are just coming together in a way that they're making a blend all of their own and the
way that we mixed it together that is kind of like when you make a rub so all these things just come
together and they cook together for a long time so it's really full there's not a boring bite um
it's not like I'm looking for oh I want a piece of chicken or I need to get a certain amount of rice
just every spoonful has a very consistent nice flavor to it if you're making this at home do not
skip the lemon that is the treat that is what's really great here we made this I was trying to
prepare for this this episode so I actually made this for my family last night and everybody really
liked it we have curry I don't know we probably make curry once every few weeks at our house
and this is the recipe that they want to switch to it's really really good um I don't know what
to say about its accuracy to Indian cooking in the time period like I said this recipe is coming from
an English cookbook so they're playing with those flavors but I can't say that this is exactly the
recipe that folks in India would be making if you know anything about that in the comments section
make sure to weigh in on that we're all working together here to educate ourselves to learn more
about history if you've got something to say about that I really encourage you don't hold
your comments back get them in there but this as far as curry that I know this is on point
this tastes slight curry and I've never had one that had that citrus aromatic thing going on as
much as this which is really nice it's so much fun when we have an opportunity on this channel to get
outside of the normal realm of what we make we do a lot of English cooking we do some french cooking
and some other European cooking so we do a lot of pies and soups and different dishes
that are familiar to us already this is something special if you want to see another episode where
we kind of get outside of our comfort zone and we try something from another place check out
this video on pepper pot it's from the Caribbean and it is delicious thank you for watching today