The American South has long laid claim to Country Captain. As found on tables from Charleston to Savannah, it’s a dish of chicken crisped then simmered with half-melted tomatoes and curry powder. It comes with toppings, decorous or wanton, as you wish: almonds and grated coconut for crunch, sweet-sour currants, nubs of bacon like a strafe of salt. The constant is a bed of Carolina rice, each grain fluffed and preening.
But curry powder is no more native to the United States than tomatoes (which grew wild in the Andes before they were cultivated by the Mayans in Central America and may have ended up in the Carolinas via the Caribbean). It was a British shortcut to Indian flavors, a spice mix first commercially packaged and sold in the late 18th century, after the London-based East India Company seized control of much of the subcontinent, fielding a private army bigger than Britain’s.
In “The Raj at Table,” the New Zealander food historian David Burton notes, “The term ‘country’ used to refer to anything of Indian, as opposed to British, origin.” So the country captain of the recipe’s name wasn’t some sleepy rural squire but most likely a commander, either of a ship plying the trade routes to and from India or of Indian troops pressed into British service. As for curry powder, it was just an approximation of the kind of spice blends that Indian cooks tailor to each dish, “infinitely changeable,” as the Canadian writer Naben Ruthnum puts it in “Curry: Eating, Reading, and Race.”
An earlier version of Country Captain persists in Britain and India. Rohan Kamicheril, the founder and editor of Tiffin, a website devoted to the regional cuisines of India, and in nonpandemic times, a dapper supper-club host, grew up eating the dish in Bangalore. His mother follows the recipe of her mother, who was of Anglo-Indian descent. It has none of the soupy tomatoes of its American counterpart, no stew or gravy, nothing so thick as to constitute a sauce. All you need are the hot juices running from the chicken.
Only a few spices are called for: turmeric, ginger-garlic paste — which you can mash up quickly in a mortar and pestle or buy premade — and Kashmiri chile powder, red as a blood moon and barely hotter than paprika, although the heat, faintly sweet, lingers. (Paprika and cayenne together will yield a similar flavor, if not as ardent a color.) Vinegar is the last, vital touch, the sourness that twangs the nerve and startles the other flavors into focus.
Kamicheril’s mother considers Country Captain a British dish, and accordingly she serves it not with rice but with what she calls “nice soft bread.” This means white bread, but treated like chapati, torn by hand and wrapped around the hunks of chicken, potato and tangled onions. “It’s English food, but refracted through an Indian lens,” Kamicheril says — a legacy of colonials with palates newly awakened to the possibilities of spice.
To Kamicheril, Country Captain is luxury. The recipe is simple, but it takes skill and care to make. You have to keep your eye on the pan, alert to the darkening of onions, ready to rescue the potatoes before they hit the far side of gold. Save some of the frying oil to gloss the pan for the chicken, and you’ll get an extra lift of flavor.
It can take skill to eat too. The recipe here uses boneless, skinless chicken thighs, but in Bangalore, Kamicheril’s mother starts with a whole chicken, bought not from a butcher but from “the chicken guy,” Kamicheril says. Almost every part is used, cut down into knobby little pieces, bones and all. The bones bring their own meatiness. Some have sharp edges, although this is not an obstacle, Kamicheril insists: Grappling with them is half the fun, forcing you “to get in there and use your teeth.”
There is immediacy, and intimacy, to this seemingly plain-spoken dish. “In big Indian celebrations, you cook everything ahead of time,” Kamicheril explains. But Country Captain must be eaten as soon as it’s made. “It’s a fleeting, beautiful thing,” he says. You can’t make it for a crowd, only a chosen few, who must gather quickly at the table and be prepared to pounce.
Recipe: Country Captain
