Inspiration: Marissa Nicosia’s modernization of a recipe in the University of Pennsylvania’s Ms. Codex 644 Grandmama Frankland’s recipe book. The manuscript was begun after 1700, but the Oxford English Dictionary shows that curry had made its way into English texts as early as 1598, in Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s Discours of voyages into ye Easte & West Indies. The fact that curry had long been connected to fine dining — the title The Forme of Cury (from the French cuire, to cook) had been attached to a fourteenth-century collection of English recipes associated with Richard II’s court — may well have lingered to make the spicy dish seem more familier.
While Frankland uses chicken in her dish, it was readily adapted for our vegan option.
To read the recipe’s three manuscript pages, with a detailed description of what goes into Frankland’s “India Mixture,” click on the images below.