Pot of Patchree

I have had a busy few months, going on my year-end holiday, then preparing first for Christmas followed by Chinese New Year.  Then the start of the work year meant less time for my various pastimes, including updating this blog.  Well, time to make up for the quiet few months!

I decided this year to make Patchree for our extended family Christmas meal and followed that up with the traditional curry devil on New Year's Day.

Brinjal Patchree

Patchree (also spelt patchri), it seems, is not a well known dish.  In fact I could not find many references to it online.  Fascinatingly, however, I found one, of all unlikely sources, in the archives of the Washington Post, embedded in a 1984 article about the chef from the Singapore Embassy in Washington DC!  So I am truly adding something new to the universe of information found online by adding this simple recipe here!

Anyway, patchree is a Eurasian vegetable dish, probably Portuguese in origin given its hot and sour curry base, and the complex mixture of spices which go into the dish.  It's traditionally made with pineapple or brinjals, but I suspect the pineapple one is more popular, albeit called by the more common name of "pineapple curry".  Variations on how to prepare the dish exist - one recipe from "Robin's Eurasian Recipes" fries the brinjals, and then ladles the sauce on top.   Others cook the brinjals in the gravy.  This year, since I love lots of gravy, especially with loads of chili, I decided to go with Mrs Handy's recipe, which cookes the brinjal in a tamarind-based gravy.  I was glad I did - my Grandmother used to refer to Mrs Handy quite a bit and so the flavours of this dish brought back memories of her cooking.  And I think my family members felt the same way, for the dish was mostly finished with only three small pieces left at the end of the meal.

Devil Curry

One of my aunts brought a pot of devil curry for dinner, which sort of whet my appetite for more.  So, I whipped up another pot for our New Year's Day meal.  I basically used the same devil curry recipe which I have already included in this blog, but added potatoes and tomatoes into the mix.  And since we had some rather nice expensive bratwurst (or whatever "wurst") I put that in too, rather than the tiny little cocktail sausages.

Just the memory of the dish makes my mouth water.  Which is why I've added in the photo into this post as well.

Anyway, here's the brinjal patchree recipe from Mrs Ellie Handy's "My Favourite Recipes" (I added in the English names of the spices, and quantities of the spices in powdered form):

Ingredients

4 tablespooons oil
10 shallots, finely sliced
6 cloves garlic, chopped
1 cm fresh ginger, chopped

Curry Paste
1 dessertspoon Ketumbar (2 teaspoons coriander powder)

1 dessertspoon jintan puteh (2 teaspoons cumin powder)

1/2 dessertspoon jintan manis (1 teaspoon fennel powder)

Piece of turmeric, size of two peas (1/2 teaspoon turmeric powder)

8 dried chilies, soaked

2 cups thick tamarind juice from 1.5 dessertspoon tamarind

2 tablespoons sugar, or to taste (I used 4!)

Salt to taste

4 brinjals

3 green and 3 red chillies, split halfway up

2 sprigs curry leaves, optional (for garnish).

Directions

1. Cut the brinjals lengthwise into half, and then cut each piece into two.  Make two diagonal slits in the flesh of each piece and soak in water for about half an hour.

2. Make the curry paste, by blending the spices and chillies together (of course you can pound it all together if you wish).  May need to add a little oil to the mixture if you are using all powders. 

3.  Fry the onions, garlic and ginger in the oil till soft.  Add the curry paste and fry till fragrant.  Then add the tamarind juice, salt and sugar to taste.  Then add the brinjals and chillies.  Cover the wok (I always use a wok) and leave to cook.  Garnish with the curry leaves.

That's it!  Simple but yummy.  If you're interested, more recipes by Mrs Handy here. 

What the Devil

Ellice Handy's Curry Devil

Devil Curry (also called Curry Debal, Curry Devil, etc) is one of those classic Eurasian dishes, for which every household has their own special recipe and their own traditions surrounding when they cook/prepare it.  But, one key characteristic of this dish is that it is cooked with leftover meats.  So, most households will make it after Christmas Day - a good way to use up all that leftover turkey!  I must admit that in my household, we don't cook this particular dish.  We normally don't have turkey on Christmas Day in the first place.  It's roast lamb and cold ham for us.  That's why I often end making gammon curry instead.  And for some reason, we just don't make it other times of the year.  

This year, however, my uncle turned up on Christmas Day with a lovely roast turkey, complete with all the accompaniments of stuffing, gravy, cranberry sauce and even a lovely little cranberry and apple relish.  Of course, we could not finish the turkey.  I turned to my recipe books for a good Curry Devil. I read through the lengthy lists of ingredients (including roast pork, potatoes, cucumber and even cabbage).  But my mother had only one recipe in mind - Ellice Handy's recipe out of her 'My Favourite Recipes" cookbook.  That was the version her mother used and if was good enough for her mother, it was good enough for us.  No potatoes, no cucumber, no cabbage.  No roast pork even (my mother wouldn't have minded, but we didn't have any in the house).  It was just the leftover roast turkey meat and some sausages.  

This is a nice, simple recipe to cook.  And since the meat is all cooked up, it's pretty fast too.  I doubled the quantities in Ellice Handy's recipe since I was using far more than 1/2 pound of meat.  Also some slight variations here and there. It's one wicked dish!

Here we go:

Ingredients:

4 slices of ginger, cut into short strips

2 large onions, sliced

Leftover meats (I used about a quarter of a turkey, plus 3 sausages, sliced)

(1 tablespoon of brown mustard seeds, optional)

3 tablespoons of tomato paste (or use 2 large tomatoes, sliced)

2 teaspoons of mustard (Coleman's)

4 tablespoons vinegar

1 tablespoon sugar

Spice paste

12 shallots, peeled

2 cloves of garlic

10 dried chillis, soaked in warm water till soft and cut up (add more chillis for extra wickedness!)

4 fresh chillis 

1 teaspoon of tumeric powder

1 teaspoon of belacan, toasted

3-4 buah keras (candlenuts)

Directions:

1.  Prepare the spice paste, pounding ingredients together (or use a food processor like me). 

2. Fry the ginger and large onions in a large pan till soft.  Add in the mustard seeds (cover the pan until they have popped).

3.  Add the spice paste, fry till fragrant.  Add the leftover meat and sausages.

4.  Add the remaining ingredients.  Continue to cook, adding a little water (keep it a dry curry though) for some gravy.  Ready when the gravy thickens a little.

Lucky Ducky

Duck with Chestnuts

After making pot roast for Christmas, was it any surprise that when I looked through my lovely new Mrs Handy, that I was immediately drawn to this Duck Pot Roast recipe?

I had a special occasion coming up, too. Some friends and I take turns hosting dinner. We each bring a dish, but it's not quite pot luck since we assign the dishes to be made in advance. Anyway, it was my turn to play host. What better to bring to a “pot luck”, I reasoned, than a pot roast? And I'd been dying to try my hand at cooking a whole duck.

I'm delighted to say that it went rather well. The duck was moist, juicy and the chestnuts were soft and tasty.  I'm pleased to say that the chestnuts were  my addition to the recipe.  They do add to the labour of making the dish though.  Whilst partially shelled, removing the rest of the shell and the outer skin of what must have been around 30 chestnuts took me about an hour. So feel free to drop the chestnuts if you wish.

Ingredients
1 whole duck (mine was approx 2.7kg and cost me $22)
2 tablespoons roasted coriander, finely pounded
1 teaspoon black peppercorns, finely pounded
1 dessertspoon sugar
Salt (to taste)
2-4 tablespoons thick soy sauce

3 tablespoons vegetable oil
2 shallots
2 teacups water
1 stick cinnamon
3-4 cloves

(Could add star anise as well, but I stuck to the recipe and didn't try this out).

300g chestnuts (boil  for about 20min or so, remove shell and skin)

Directions
1.  Rub the ground ingredients over the duck, together with the sugar, salt and soy sauce.

2.  Use a large, heavy bottomed pot.  Fry the onions in the oil till soft.  Add the duck, and fry till browned.  Add the spices, chestnuts and the water.  Cover the pot and cook.  Check the duck and turn over in the course of cooking.

3.  The duck should be cooked after about 1-1.5 hours. Remove duck and chestnuts, pour gravy in separate jug. Skim off the fat, and add the remaining gravy to the duck and chestnuts. (Be sure to keep the fat though. To use for cooking other dishes).

My Own Ellice Handy

Elsewhere in this blog, I have made reference to the excellent Mrs Handy's cookbook, "My Favourite Recipes". My grandmother has a copy of the first edition, my mother swears by her second edition. And me? I am glad to say that I got my copy of the fourth edition, as a Christmas gift. It's a beautiful hardback book, with the introduction from Mrs Handy and an additional background note about her life.

Where the original only contained the written recipes, this version includes photos, additional mouthwatering incentive to try out the recipes. The recipes include not just the imperial measurements (the complaint of an earlier post) but handy conversions to metric measurements (pun intended).

I am looking forward to trying out my first recipe from this new cookbook :-)

(Mrs Handy's "My Favourite Recipes" is available from major bookstores.  Or you can, as suggested in a comment on my blog, write to sallych@landmarkbooks.com.sg to place an order.)

Cooking Fish Moolie

Fish Moolie
Originally uploaded by Taking5

Fish Moolie is a classic Eurasian dish, one which probably made its way to Singapore via India.  But the recipe for this mild fish curry is not easy to find.  Most recipe books don't have it - but I found it in two - in our ancient copy of Ellice Handy's cookbook, one of the oldest local cookbooks around (probably now out of print) and another in Robin's Eurasian Recipes, a recent publication. Robin is the father of Quentin Pereira, the owner and chef behind Quentin's restaurant, and it is his curry moolie recipe on the menu of Quentin's.

My mother prefers Mrs Handy's recipe as it is the one which her mother used to cook.  And, of course, that's the recipe we've had for the longest time.  Our local daily domestic also learnt how to make the dish and today, I swear her version is the best ever.  She has long retired, and so I have to cook it myself if I want to eat it.  And actually, it is far easier than one would imagine.

Ingredients:

Fish - about 500-600g.  Can use ikan kurau (threadfin), red fish.  The photo above features sea bream.
2 stalks lemon grass or serai (white portion only),
1-1.5cm of galangal or lengkuas
4 candlenuts or buah keras
1 teaspoon tumeric powder
2 large onions
1.5cm ginger, cut into strips
250ml coconut milk
Vinegar, sugar, salt to taste; flour for thickening

Pound the lemongrass, galangal, candlenuts together (or blended together), mix in the tumeric powder.
Fry the ginger and onions till soft but not brown, add the pounded ingredients and fry till fragrant.  Add 150ml of the coconut milk, diluted with 500ml water (or so) and pinch of salt.  Gently poach fish in the coconut gravy (gravy should reach at least two-thirds up the fish).  Cover the pan whilst poaching.  When fish is almost cooked, turn it over, and add the remaining thick coconut milk plus vinegar and sugar to taste.  Thicken with flour as required to reach desired consistency.  Top off with deep fried onions/garlic/chillis as desired.  Aside from the topping, this dish has no chilli, so it is not spicy at all.

Christmas Baking

When I went to the Peranakan Museum after Hungrygowhere's Big Eat Out, I spotted something in the "Junk to Jewels" exhibition which I did not come across in my first, rather rushed visit to the Museum. It was a nonya's recipe book - not a published cookbook but a series of recipes which she had collected and copied into an exercise book. The originators of the recipes were also faithfully recorded as well, eg "Mrs X's Fried Chicken".

I smiled when I saw that because it reminded me of my mother's well-worn "Mrs Handy's Cookbook" (2nd Edition). These cookbooks probably started off the same way, when women recorded their favourite recipes in exercise books together with the source of the recipe. Finally, of course Mrs Handy published her cookbook with its references to "Kwa's layer cake" (for eg). These cookbooks also had no photos at all (hard to imagine today), and empty pages in each section. Why? Of course, the answer is so that ladies have space to insert their new additional recipes! My mother was certainly no exception. Her "Mrs Handy's" is bristling with additional recipes, cut out from magazines (or off the backs of those soup and carnation evaporated milk tins) or copied from other sources.

I must now admit that my mother and I just love reading cookbooks and collecting recipes. But we have only ever tried out a small proportion of these recipes. One of my projects, indeed, is to cook through more recipes from our cookbooks. The problem is that the rate we acquire cookbooks seems to be far greater than the rate at which we try out the recipes in them. Having said that, there is one tried and tested recipe amongst the many my mother has copied into her "Mrs Handy's" - for Shortbread Biscuits.

I remember as a child my mother happily making preparations for Christmas - the Christmas tree, the presents, the food. She would bake trays of these shortbread biscuits with her two young children "helping out" along the way. She did the heavy work (creaming the butter and sugar) whilst we assisted with cutting out the biscuits, pricking the tops with forks or toothpicks and making little snowmen out of the remnants of the dough. And eating bits of the uncooked dough as well (it was so rich in butter and sugar). We'd then put them in the oven and the smell of the baking would fill the house. The biscuits were better than any commercial shortbread. They were a big favourite with visitors because of the way they just melted in the mouth.

For various reasons, we'd stopped baking for Christmas for a few years. But this year, I had started baking again. It seemed only natural that we should bake a batch of shortbread again this Christmas. And yes, the uncooked dough was as good as I remembered...

So here's the recipe (and you know it is pretty old because it is all in ounces). Be thankful, it is at least in weight measurements and not volumes:

Ingredients

8 oz butter

6 oz granulated sugar

10 oz flour

2 oz cornflour

Instructions

1. Cream butter and sugar till white (or light)

2. Sift the flour, and fold into the creamed butter and sugar to form the dough.

3. Roll the dough out to a thickness of about 1/3rd inch. Cut out the biscuits using cookie cutters. Prick holes on top using a fork/toothpicks.

4. Bake for about 15 minutes in preheated oven (temperature of about 180 degrees C).

5. Dust with icing sugar.

A lot easier to bake than pineapple tarts, too!

The Night Before Christmas

Every Christmas Eve, my mother’s family gets together for dinner. It’s a tradition which we have had ever since I can remember. Christmas is a big thing for Eurasian families. The Christmas tree and Christmas decorations are put up. Christmas goodies (sugee cake, pineapple tarts, shortbread, fruit cake!) are baked or bought. Christmas presents are carefully selected, wrapped and placed under the tree.

My mother reminisces fondly of Christmases past. Those were the days when Christmas Eve was (for Catholics) a day of fast and abstinence. But, my grandmother would prepare Mulligatawny Soup (a hot, peppery and curry-like soup) and boil the Christmas ham all day, filling the house with delicious fragrances, thus making the fast/abstinence all the more difficult (particularly for my grandmother, who cooked the food without even tasting it!). In the days without refrigerators, the ham came cured and packed in sacking. So it was necessary to boil the ham to remove some of the salt.

My grandparents would take their children for Midnight Mass every year. Everyone dressed in their best for church then and obviously for Christmas, a special effort was made. Men came in tuxedos and women in their beautiful frocks and hats. After mass, my grandparents and their family would go home and consume the soup, ham together with a crusty loaf of French bread and a glass of wine. And, my grandfather would start pouring out liquers. For children, he would prepare a special version of Creme de Menthe, a peppermint liquer which he would then dilute with water (I remember him giving me little wineglasses of this too). They would hold open house (yes, this is in the wee hours of Christmas morning!) and everyone would have a good time, chatting, talking and eating.

These days, things are a little different. There is no fast and abstinence (praise the Lord!) and so we have our Christmas Eve dinner at regular dinner hours. And, the variety of food on offer is really quite extensive. This year, we had roast turkey and lamb in addition to the ham and soup (unfortunately, I'd put in too much coconut milk - see below - but it tasted absolute scrumptious anyway). Plus vegetables, lasagna, pasta, rice (saffron and tomato) and gigantic salads. There was fruit, chocolates and cake for dessert and wine to drink. We take out our songsheets and start caroling (not too untunefully, and quite enthusiastically). Then, the kids (defined as anyone who is not earning money) get their presents and they typically put up a little performance for our benefit. Sometimes some family members do go for midnight mass - but we certainly don’t stay up till all hours of the morning thereafter!

Our Christmas tree, too, is a little different from previous years. We have stopped putting Christmas lights or tinsel on our tree. The reason? My dear little cat thinks that the tree and the little baubles, angels and santa elves hanging from its branches are there specially for her benefit and amusement. She also does not think that our arrangements of the tree ornaments are done well and takes the opportunity to rearrange them, frequently taking them off the tree altogether. The result - we have had no choice but to adopt a minimalist style of tree decor.

Here's a recipe for mulligatawny soup below. My grandmother and mother both swear by Mrs Ellice Handy's book, "My Favourite Recipes" and this recipe is modified from her original recipe.

Mulligatawny Soup
based on Ellice Handy's My Favourite Recipes, 2nd Edition. Printed by Malaysia Printers Ltd, 1967.

ingredients
6 pieces chicken breasts - steamed and shredded

2 cubes chicken stock

3 tablespoons coriander seeds
(tablespoons refers to big serving spoons here)
1 tablespoon fennel seeds
1 tablespoon cumin seeds
1 tablespoon of peppercorns (but really to taste - put less if you prefer)
6 dried chillis (again, to taste)
1 small piece cinnamon
2 cloves
1 tablespoon tumeric powder
(the above to be all pounded together; alternatively just use a blender)

4 cloves garlic (chopped)
1/2 cup shallots (chopped)
1/2 teaspoon of fenugreek (or alba)
1 teaspoon of mustard seeds

2-3 teacups of cocnut milk (from half coconut)
Tamarind juice (use about 2 tablespoons of the tamarind pulp, soaked and drained - but this is to taste)
Salt
Oil for frying

Boiled rice

instructions

• fry the onions and garlic in a deep pan. Thereafter, add the mustard seeds, fenugreek and the pounded ingredients. Fry for a few minutes, until the mustard seeds pop.
• Add the chicken cubes, two cups (about 500ml) of water and salt and simmer for at least half an hour. Intent is to extract the spices and flavours from the spice mix.
• Strain the mixture, and to the gravy add the coconut milk, tamarind juice and taste. Note that the coconut milk should be thin coconut milk. If you are using a packet of coconut cream, dilute it. Add in more tamarind juice if you like the soup a little more sour. It is also good to have on hand some ready pounded spices just in case you feel the flavours don't quite come out. (Obviously this is not something Mrs Handy would recommend but not all of us are such good cooks!).
• When the soup is boiling, add in the shredded chicken. Pour on top of a serving of rice to eat, or eat with French bread.

Toppings

Soup can be topped with fried onions, garlic, and coriander. My grandmother also served it with fresh red chilli pounded with salt. Up to each person to decide how spicy and hot the mulligatawny soup needed to be.

Merry Christmas!