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Eggs, Curried
Fry a couple of middle-sized onions in butter, and stir into the pan, as soon as the onions are slightly browned, one table-spoonful of curry-powder. Mix well, and add by degrees half a pint of veal stock; keep stirring the sauce until it is smooth and thick. When the mixture has simmered from ten to fifteen minutes, add, carefully stirring, two table-spoonfuls of cream, and let it simmer a few minutes longer. Have ready sliced half a dozen hard-boiled eggs, lay them in the curry sauce long enough to get quite hot, then serve both together on a dish. Time, half an hour to prepare; eight or ten minutes to boil eggs. Sufficient, two eggs for each person.
A simple curry sauce built on fried onion, with hard-boiled eggs warmed through at the last minute. The only real risk is overcooking, both of the eggs and of the curry powder.
- Cook the powder, then stopThe hinge is the moment the curry powder hits the buttery onions: it needs about a minute over gentle heat to lose its raw, dusty edge, but Victorian powders were heavy on turmeric and coriander, which scorch quickly. Add the stock as soon as it smells fragrant rather than letting it sit in the hot pan.
- Half a pintThis is an imperial pint, so half a pint is 10 fl oz, about 285 ml, rather than the 8 fl oz of a US cup measure. Erring towards the larger amount is safer, since the sauce reduces over the ten to fifteen minutes of simmering.
- Veal stockRarely sold now. A light chicken stock is the closest everyday substitute; a good vegetable stock also works, though the sauce will be thinner in body. Avoid a dark beef stock, which will overwhelm the spice.
- ThickeningThere is no flour here, so the sauce thickens only by reduction and by the onions breaking down. If it stays loose, simmer longer or press the onions against the pan; do not be tempted to boil hard after the cream goes in.
- The creamTwo tablespoons of cream, added off a rolling boil. There is no acid in the sauce to curdle it, but a low simmer keeps it from splitting.
- Boiling the eggsEight to ten minutes gives the firm, fully set yolk this dish wants for slicing. Cool them in cold water before peeling so the yolks stay yellow rather than greying at the edge.
- Warming, not cookingThe eggs go in only long enough to heat through, two or three minutes. Left to simmer, the whites turn rubbery and begin to break up in the sauce.
- YieldSix eggs at two per person serves three as a light supper dish, more if served over rice.
Curried eggs belong to the long domestication of Indian cookery in the British kitchen, where by the middle of the nineteenth century "curry" had come to mean a specific formula: onions fried in butter, a spoonful of commercial curry powder from a tin, stock, and something to carry it. Ready-blended powders had been sold in London since the late eighteenth century, and their existence is exactly what makes a recipe like this possible for a household cook who had never seen a whole spice roasted. The dish also solved a practical problem in a period when eggs were plentiful and cheap in season: it turns six hard-boiled eggs into a hot dish substantial enough for supper or a breakfast sideboard.