This is the Best East Indian Fish Curry

Another shorty on which Price spent all of eighteen seconds while writing the Treasury. There’s nothing to write about. It’s a stand-alone recipe culled from The Grille at the Hotel Pierre in New York–included here for the sake of completion.

But again, we turn to the menu of the Pierre to see what the Price’s could’ve ordered instead.

Not much.

The Pierre has always been a luxurious hotel, settled on the corner of 161st and Fifth Avenue across from Central Park. They are a residential hotel and always have been, and in 1964 the permanent residents could have included such luminaries as Elizabeth Taylor and Aristotle Onassis. In the early 60s, its residents and guests would have been smokers and rich complainers (I may be generalizing) or the main characters of Mad Men in which the hotel was mentioned in a number of episodes.

Although They Never mentioned Fish Curry

And the menu reflects this. The inclusion of Indian cuisine clearly reflects the cultural background of the owner, Charles Pierre Casalusco, who moved to New York from Corsica and dropped his Corsican surname. He worked in his father’s restaurant as a boy in Ajaccio, the city where Napoleon was born. Corsica is a French Island in the Mediterranean, and is a very cosmopolitan joint, with a historic unending stream of travelers and tourists from the eyebrows of the African Continent, Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The cuisine of Corsica reflects this influence and might be why Escoffier and Chef Pierre decided to serve their limited list of curries.

I’m about to mention Chateaubriand

The menu included in the Treasury, apparently from the day the Price’s enjoyed their dinner, does not offer the Fish Curry listed below. It offers only Beef Curry or Chicken Curry. The rest of the menu is decidedly American old school: chopped steak, lamb chops, squab, and broiled lobster. The Chateaubriand for two and the Double Steak also for two are the most expensive items, at $15 circa 1964 which is $118 in 2017.

The Price’s meal of curry, rice, and dessert, assuming they ordered a glass of wine each would have set them back about $11 or $86.87 in 2017 dollars.