A recent article in Bon Appetit boasted a healthy new basics approach to comforting old American favorites like Eggplant Parmesan, Beef Stroganoff, Tamale Pie and Country Captain. "Whoa, Country Captain?", I went. "What the hell is THAT?" I read the recipe and was even more surprised: coming from America's deep south, it's essentially chicken cooked with a mildly curried tomato sauce. I had no idea what part of the recipe was the old and which was the new. Given it's southern origins, I actually presumed the curry seasoning to be the new part. Then forgot about it.
Until two days ago. That's when I checked Charmaine Solomon's Encyclopedia of Asian Cooking for information about Chinese black chickens (strangely there was none, though that book almost never lets me down) for Mike's thread, and stumbled over a recipe there for, of all things, Country Captain. Quite surprising for anything that could fit within the first context to have a home in the second, as the latter tends to confine itself to authentic ethnic cooking and whatever else Country Captain is, it's not that.
Or, I asked myself this morning, is it? So I googled Country Captain. Up popped, in 1st place, a Wikipedia entry suggesting that nobody really knows where the name came from and in pretty much 2nd, 3rd and 4th places, recipes from Bobby Flay, Rachel Ray and Emeril Lagasse.
Apparently everybody on the planet but me knows about Country Captain.
In 5th of 6th place was an entry on Linda Stradley's What's Cooking America site, and bless her heart she has done her sleuthing into the origins of the dish and how it came to be so named.
The Hobson Jobson Dictionary states the following:
COUNTRY-CAPTAIN. This is in Bengal the name of a peculiar dry kind of curry, often served as a breakfast dish. We can only conjecture that it was a favourite dish at the table of the skippers of ‘country ships,’ who were themselves called ‘country captains,’ as in our first quotation. In Madras the term is applied to a spatchcock dressed with onions and curry stuff, which is probably the original form. [Riddell says: “Country-captain.—Cut a fowl in pieces; shred an onion small and fry it brown in butter; sprinkle the fowl with fine salt and curry powder and fry it brown; then put it into a stewpan with a pint of soup; stew it slowly down to a half and serve it with rice” (Ind. Dom. Econ. 176).]
1792.—“But now, Sir, a Country Captain is not to be known from an ordinary man, or a Christian, by any certain mark whatever.”—Madras Courier, April 26.
c. 1825.—“The local name for their business was the ‘Country Trade,’ the ships were ‘Country Ships,’ and the masters of them ‘Country Captains.’ Some of my readers may recall a dish which was often placed before us when dining on board these vessels at Whampoa, viz. ‘Country Captain.’”—The Fankwae at Canton (1882), p. 33.
This delicious dish, known throughout Georgia, dates to the early 1800s. It is thought that this dish was brought to Georgia by a British sea captain who had been stationed in Bengali, India and shared the recipe with some friends in the port city of Savannah, Georgia. Savannah was then a major shipping port for the spice trade. The dish was named for the officers in India called “Country Captains.”
In the 1940s, Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945), 32nd President of the United States and General George S. Patton (1885-1945), U.S. Army General, were served this dish in Warm Springs, Georgia, by Mrs. W. L. Bullard. Their praise and love of this dish helped to rekindle its Southern classic status. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt who first gave national recognition to Warm Springs when, in 1924, he visited the town's naturally heated mineral springs as treatment for his polio related paralysis. Roosevelt was so enchanted with Warm Springs that he built the only home he ever owned here - a modest, six room cottage called the Little White House which served as a relaxing, comfortable haven for him.
So what is it? Most recipe writers seem to agree that it's chicken braised with bell peppers, canned tomatoes and a nominal amount of curry powder finished with a handful of raisins then served on plain white rice and topped with toasted almonds.
So am I dying to try the dish? Uh...not exactly. Love chicken, love curry, but one half a tablespoon of curry powder for 1 whole chicken stewed with 3 cups of canned tomatoes (as per Emeril's version, which was fairly median to all those I read) paints the picture of a fairly tame dish meant to appeal to different tastes than mine. It looks, well, bland. Like Indian food for people who don't really know or understand Indian Food, or Southern Belle Women's Club luncheon Indian food. Admittedly, Bobby Flay's version is far more interesting to my eye than Emeril's, but that's because it has spicy splendor in the manner of a real Indian curry. Which begs the question: why not just cook and eat a real Indian chicken curry?
I think I will.
Perhaps because I'm from hillbilly stock rather than coastal?