Curried Eggs
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 6 hard-cooked eggs 1 small chopped onion 1 chopped sour apple 2 teaspoonfuls curry powder 1 lemon 4 chopped butternuts, or 6 chopped almonds 3 tablespoonfuls cornstarch 2 cupfuls milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt Croutons Boil eggs till hard, peel and place in cold water until required. Fry onion in Crisco a few minutes, add curry powder, apple, nuts, and cornstarch moistened with milk. Simmer fifteen minutes. Stir from time to time. If too thick add a little white stock or water. Cut eggs in halves, and lay them in the sauce with the salt to get thoroughly hot through. Put eggs into deep hot dish, strain sauce over them, garnish with croutons and lemon slices.
A mild Edwardian curry sauce built on cornstarch rather than roux, used to blanket halved hard-boiled eggs. Most of the work is in getting the sauce right; the eggs only need reheating.
- Crisco and the substitutionThis book was published to promote Crisco, so the shortening appears in nearly every recipe. Two tablespoons of butter, ghee or a neutral oil does the same job here and tastes better with curry powder.
- Bloom the curry powderThe hinge of the dish: the powder goes into the hot fat with the onion before any liquid arrives. Commercial curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty and bitter unless it is fried for a minute or two in fat first.
- Cornstarch quantityThree tablespoons of cornstarch to two cups of milk is a thick sauce by modern standards, and the recipe allows for it: add white stock or water if it stiffens too far. Two tablespoons is closer to a coating consistency; slake it in a little milk before it meets the pan, as written.
- The fifteen-minute simmerCornstarch reaches full thickness within a minute or two of coming to a boil and then slowly slackens again with prolonged heat and stirring. The long simmer here is really for the apple and onion to soften; keep the heat low, stir often, and expect to add liquid.
- ButternutsButternut is Juglans cinerea, the white walnut, once common in the northeastern United States and now scarce because of canker disease. Almonds are the recipe's own alternative; walnuts or cashews also work.
- Sour appleA tart firm cooking apple - Granny Smith, Bramley. The acid is doing the same job the lemon does at the table, cutting a sauce that is otherwise all milk and starch.
- Reheating the eggsHard-cooked eggs held in cold water go into the sauce only to warm through, five minutes at most over low heat. Boiled again they turn rubbery and the yolks chalk.
- StrainingStraining the sauce over the eggs leaves the apple, onion and nuts behind, so the finished plate is smooth. If you would rather keep the texture, skip it - nothing else in the method depends on it.
- YieldSix eggs and two cups of sauce serves four as a light main course with rice or toast, six as a first course. The croutons and lemon slices are the whole garnish.
A Calendar of Dinners was written by Marion Harris Neil and issued by Procter & Gamble to sell Crisco, which came on the market in 1911; the shortening is named in almost every recipe in the book, this one included. Curried eggs themselves belong to a much older Anglo-Indian domestic tradition that reached American kitchens by way of British cookery writing, where curry powder - a British commercial blend with no single Indian counterpart - was treated as one more flavouring for a white sauce. The apple and the nuts are the giveaway: sweet-and-sour fruit stirred into a mild curry is a hallmark of Victorian and Edwardian British curry cookery rather than of any Indian original, and it survived in English kitchens well into the twentieth century. Eggs made the dish cheap, which may be part of why it sits comfortably in a book organised around planning a year of household dinners.