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Curry Sauce
White Sauce No. 2 with 1 teaspoon curry mixed with Gold Medal flour and seasonings.
Maitre d'Hotel Butter 1/3 cup butter 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/8 teaspoon pepper 2 teaspoons finely chopped parsley 1 tablespoon lemon juice Work the butter until creamy, add seasonings and parsley, then the lemon juice very slowly.
Two short fish accompaniments compressed into one entry: a curry-flavoured white sauce given only as a variation, and a compound butter. The curry sauce depends on a recipe printed elsewhere in the book.
- White Sauce No. 2Books of this period commonly numbered their white sauces by thickness, from thin to thick, with the middle number serving as the general-purpose sauce. The curry is built on that medium sauce, which is printed elsewhere in the book; check the book's own proportions rather than assuming them.
- Where the curry goesThe instruction to mix the curry powder with the flour and seasonings matters. Stirred into the roux it toasts in the hot butter for a minute and loses its raw, dusty edge; sprinkled into the finished sauce it tastes flat and gritty.
- One teaspoon is a starting pointCommercial curry powders of the period were generally milder and less varied than what is sold now. Modern powders differ widely in heat and freshness, so taste and adjust rather than treating the teaspoon as fixed.
- YieldThe compound butter works out to a little over 1/3 cup. The recipe states no yield for either sauce or butter; serving counts are a matter of judgement.
- Adding the lemon slowlyThis is the hinge of the butter. Softened butter will take up only a little liquid at a time; a tablespoon of juice poured in at once separates into greasy flecks and weeping liquid. Add it a few drops at a time, working between additions, and it stays creamy.
- Butter temperature"Work the butter until creamy" means cool and pliable, not melted or half-melted. If it slumps, chill it briefly and start creaming again.
- Shaping and servingThe recipe stops at the mixing and gives no direction for shaping or serving. Compound butters of this kind were commonly chilled firm before use and set on hot food to melt.
Both of these belong to the late-Victorian sauce system that American cookery schools took wholesale from French practice and then simplified into numbered formulas. A single béchamel, graded thin, medium and thick, became the base for a dozen named sauces, curry among them — a reflection of how thoroughly curry powder had been absorbed into Anglo-American cooking through Britain's Indian trade, where it functioned less as a cuisine than as a single jar of seasoning. Maître d'hôtel butter, named for the head of the dining room rather than any cook, is among the plainest of the compound butters and was often used to finish broiled fish and steak in restaurant kitchens of the period. Its appearance in a flour company's promotional cookbook shows how far professional technique had travelled into the ordinary household kitchen.