Curried Eggs
Slice two onions and fry in butter, add a table-spoon curry-powder and one pint good broth or stock, stew till onions are quite tender, add a cup of cream thickened with arrowroot or rice flour, simmer a few moments, then add eight or ten hard-boiled eggs, cut in slices, and beat them well, but do not boil. - Mrs. E. L. Fay, Washington Heights.
A Victorian curry sauce built on stock rather than coconut milk, with sliced hard-boiled eggs folded in at the end. It comes together in about half an hour and needs only a little translation.
- "Beat them well" is almost certainly "heat them well"Sliced eggs beaten into a sauce would collapse into shreds. Read it as warming the slices through in the finished sauce off a hard boil, two or three minutes, then serve.
- Do not let it boil after the cream goes inThis is the hinge. A cream-and-starch sauce can turn grainy or thin at a rolling boil, and the egg whites toughen. Keep it at a bare tremble.
- Curry powder of the periodNineteenth-century curry powders were generally mild and turmeric- and coriander-led, though blends varied a good deal. A modern jar may be hotter, so you may prefer to start with two teaspoons and taste. Frying it briefly with the onions before the stock goes in takes the raw edge off.
- Arrowroot vs. rice flourThe recipe allows either. Arrowroot sets clear and thickens fast: about 2 teaspoons slaked in a little cold cream per cup. Rice flour needs roughly double and a few minutes of simmering to lose its chalkiness.
- A pint of stockAmerican pint, so 2 cups. The onions should stew in it until completely soft, as the recipe directs.
- EggsEight to ten hard-boiled, sliced into rounds. Cook them so the yolks are just set rather than chalky, since they get a second heating in the sauce.
- Yield and servingServes four to six. The original names no accompaniment; rice or buttered toast will both carry it.
Curried eggs belong to the long British-Indian domestic tradition that reached American cookbooks by way of English household manuals; commercially blended curry powder was being sold in England by the late eighteenth century. Recipes like this one treat it as a seasoning stirred into a familiar cream sauce rather than as the basis of an Indian dish. The result is characteristic of the period: onions, stock, cream and a starch thickener, with the curry doing the work of flavoring a cheap protein. The contributor's name and neighborhood mark it as a recipe supplied by a contributor rather than a professional cook.