Cut hard-boiled eggs in halves; then fry 1 small chopped onion and 1 chopped apple in hot butter; add ¼ cup of pounded almonds and 1 pint of milk, mixed with ½ tablespoonful of cornstarch. Season with salt and a dessertspoonful of curry-powder. Let cook ten minutes; then add the eggs. Let all get very hot. Serve with croutons; garnish with fried parsley.
A mild Anglo-Indian egg curry that reads as a thin almond sauce rather than a modern gravy. The original assumes you know how many eggs to boil and how much heat curry powder needs.
- Egg countNo quantity is given. Six hard-boiled eggs, halved, suit the pint of sauce and serve three to four; eight will stretch it.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups. A dessertspoonful is 2 teaspoons, so the curry powder is a restrained amount for 2 cups of milk. Taste and add more if your blend is old or weak.
- The hinge: cook the curry powderAdd the curry powder to the butter with the onion and apple and let it fry a minute before the milk goes in. Stirred into liquid at the end, commercial curry powder tastes raw and dusty; the fat is what carries and rounds it.
- Pounded almondsBlanched almonds ground fine, about 1/4 cup, or use almond flour. They thicken and slightly grain the sauce, which is intended; they are not there for crunch.
- Expect a thin sauceHalf a tablespoon of cornstarch to 2 cups of milk gives a pouring consistency, not a coating one. If you want it to cling to the eggs, use a full tablespoon slaked in a little cold milk.
- Ten minutes, then the eggsThe ten minutes is for the sauce to thicken and lose its starchy edge. The eggs go in only to warm through, two or three minutes off a hard boil; simmered longer the whites turn rubbery and the yolks chalky.
- Fried parsleyDry sprigs dropped into hot fat for a few seconds until they stop hissing, then drained. Wet parsley spits badly, so pat it thoroughly.
- ServingSpoon over rice, or onto toast, with the croutons around the edge. The recipe itself gives no meal placement beyond "serve with croutons."
This is curry as the English-speaking kitchen of the period understood it: a mild, milky sauce built on onion, apple and a bought curry powder, thickened with nuts and starch, and used to dress an ordinary ingredient such as eggs or cold meat. The apple is the tell: an English idea rather than an Indian one, standing in for the sweet-sour notes of tamarind or fresh chutney and giving the sauce body as it breaks down. Commercial curry powders, sold in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, made this kind of cooking possible for households that had never seen a spice being roasted or ground. Books like this one, which assigns a dish to each day of the year and labels them by nation, treated such recipes as a tour of the world from a single kitchen; "Indian" here means the Anglo-Indian repertoire brought home by colonial officials and their cooks rather than anything from a regional Indian table. Curried eggs earned their place because they were cheap, quick and reliably warm.