Curried Eggs
6 hard boiled eggs 1 cup Curry Sauce 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cut the eggs in halves, slice enough of the white off the end of each to make them stand upright. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Serve on a hot platter with the sauce poured around them.
A simple assembly dish that depends almost entirely on the sauce, which the book gives as a separate entry. Everything else is timing and presentation.
- The curry sauceThe book gives Curry Sauce as a separate entry; in books of this vintage it is usually a basic white sauce — butter and flour in equal measure with about a cup of milk or stock — with curry powder cooked into the roux. Frying the powder in the fat for a minute before the liquid goes in is what keeps it from tasting raw and dusty.
- Hard-boiled eggsTwelve minutes off the heat in covered hot water, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the grey-green ring that longer boiling produces. Older eggs peel far more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- Standing them uprightThe recipe halves the eggs crosswise and trims a little white off the end of each half so both will stand; cut with a wet knife so the yolk face stays smooth.
- Keep it hotHalved eggs cool very quickly on a cold plate. Warm the platter, and have the sauce hot and slightly loose — it thickens as it sits and will set into a paste around the eggs otherwise.
- SeasoningThe 1/2 teaspoon salt and 1/4 teaspoon pepper are for the eggs themselves, not the sauce; season the sauce separately or the dish comes out salty.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; six eggs would stretch to about three as a light supper dish, or further as part of a larger meal. Rice or toast underneath turns it into a full plate and catches the sauce.
Curried eggs belong to a long line of Anglo-American "curry" dishes in which a flour-thickened white sauce carries commercial curry powder — a blend sold ready-mixed in tins, on sale in Britain before the nineteenth century, and treated in household books as a single seasoning rather than a set of spices to be ground fresh. Eggs in that repertoire were the standard answer to a meatless meal, and books of the period routinely group a dozen ways to dress hard-boiled eggs — stuffed, creamed, scalloped, curried — for exactly that reason.