By now ya'll know I love nothing more than perusing old Southern cookbooks. One thing that caught my eye years ago when I started really connecting the dots in these recipes was the use of curry powder. Weird, you wouldn't really connect the Old South and its food ways with curry powder from India right off the bat. But quite a few Southern favorite recipes included the ambiguous and exotic-seeming spice.
So how did curry powder get to the 1800s and 1900s South? Boats, of course. Most people know about how Indian food was colonized in Britain, but it was also popular in the United States, again, by way of the Indian export trade. The Atlas Obscura article I linked to gives a great account of the currying of foods in America, and what it meant to have curry powder in your spice rack (spoiler: it meant you were well-off!). There are 11 curry-spiced recipes in Charleston Receipts, and The Virginia Housewife, one of the earliest known American cookbooks, has six curry recipes within its pages.
Curry powder itself is a questionable ingredient (the article explains this in more detail too), but it did help to introduce these Indian flavors to the decidedly bland American palate before people traveled internationally on a regular basis. Now that we all probably have at least one Indian restaurant in our towns, we can learn more about how curry is a very vague term, and how curry powder isn't exactly representative of any actual Indian cuisine. I think that as long as we know that, we can still enjoy curry powder in these vintage recipes without any guilt or problems.
One of my favorite uses is in a vichyssoise, or a chilled potato soup. The curry adds a depth of flavor that you don't get in plain vichyssoise (but it still has its delicious place at a dinner table!). In Charleston Receipts, this soup is called good for "three o'clock dinner", an old Charleston tradition that's worth a read about.
Chilled Potato Curry Soup
Ingredients
- 4 leeks trimmed and chopped in ½" pieces
- 1 pound white potatoes peeled and sliced
- 3 tablespoons butter
- 3 cups vegetable or chicken stock
- 1 cup milk, divided
- ¼ teaspoon curry powder
- salt and pepper to taste
- chopped chives to garnish
Instructions
- Melt the butter in a large stock pot over medium heat. Once melted, add the leeks. Let the leeks saute for 7 minutes.
- Add the sliced potatoes and let simmer for an additional 10 minutes. Cover the pot with a lid for this. Turn the heat down if the leeks are browning.
- Then add the stock, salt, and pepper and stir gently. Let it simmer over medium low heat, covered, for 40 minutes.
- Use an immersion blender (or gently pour the soup in batches into a blender) and blend into a smooth puree. Add ½ cup of the milk and simmer for 5 more minutes.
- Remove from heat and add additional ½ cup of milk. At this point, you can eat the soup warm, or chill in the fridge for 2 hours before serving.
- Serve with chopped chives and additional salt and pepper as desired.
Notes
As stated in the recipe, vichyssoise is meant to be served chilled on a hot summer's afternoon for lunch or an early dinner, but I liked it just as much at a warmer temperature... which no longer makes it vichyssoise really. But take a taste when it's fresh off the stove, and have a bite after the leftovers have chilled in the fridge and see which one you prefer too. Or who knows, you might like it hot in the winter and cool in the summer. That's the great thing about these vintages recipes — they are meant to be versatile. At least these days we can use an immersion blender to get it smooth, rather than smashing it through a sieve.
