The recipe below calls for three chickens, butter, cooking sherry, curry powder, egg yolks thickening the sauce. The sherry and curry powder are the tell. Both announce a stocked pantry and a cook with time. This recipe conveys caste in 1930s Alabama through food quality, quantity, and labor. Arjun Appadurai tell us that the less egalitarian a society, the louder that message runs. A brown fricassee finished with an egg-yolk liaison and seasoned with sherry and curry powder, pantry goods marking a household as well supplied in a state where most were not.
Alabama Chicken Stew
Ingredients
3 small chickens
3 tablespoons butter
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups water
2 small onions, sliced
1 sprig parsley
1 stalk celery, chopped
½ bay leaf
½ teaspoon curry powder
¼ cup cooking sherry
3 egg yolks
1 tablespoon flour
1 tablespoon water
Directions
Disjoint the chickens and rub them with salt and pepper. Brown slowly in the melted butter. Sift in one tablespoon of flour, then add the water, onions, parsley, celery, bay leaf, and the curry powder mixed with the wine. Cover and simmer for three quarters of an hour. Beat the egg yolks with the second tablespoon of flour and the tablespoon of cold water. Remove the chicken to a hot platter. Pour the hot liquid into the egg mixture, then return it to the heat to thicken for a minute. Strain the sauce and pour it over the chicken to serve.
The China Press, September 11, 1936.