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One Egg (Bread Fat for frying)
Bread. Fat for frying.
Melt the butter, and fry the curry powder and flour slightly, add milk, and stir over the fire until the mixture leaves the sides of the pan.
Then add the hard-boiled eggs chopped up, also the seasoning. Turn the mixture on to a plate to cool. Make up into small cutlets, egg and breadcrumb, and fry in hot fat. Serve with fried parsley and slices of lemon.
Œufs à la Madame.
Ingredients.
Fresh Eggs, as required.
This is a curried egg croquette "cutlet" of the kind that closed an Edwardian dinner as a savoury. The method is complete even though the quantities are not, and the technique is standard croquette practice.
- The binding sauceThe mixture is a panada: a very stiff white sauce that must be cooked until it balls up and leaves the sides of the pan clean. Standard proportions are equal weights of butter and flour with just enough milk to bind — about 1 oz each to 1/4 pint (roughly two-thirds of a US cup) for a panada this stiff. If it is at all loose, the cutlets will burst in the fat.
- Quantities are not givenNo weights are stated for butter, flour, milk, curry powder or eggs in the text as it stands. Work from the panada ratio above and add chopped hard-boiled egg until the mixture is barely bindable; four eggs to that quantity of sauce is a workable starting point.
- Cook the curry powderFrying the curry powder with the flour in the butter is the point of the recipe, not a flourish. Give it a full minute over gentle heat so the raw, dusty edge goes, but do not let it catch or the whole batch turns bitter.
- Chill properly"Turn the mixture on to a plate to cool" means cold all the way through, and an hour in the refrigerator is better than the period's cool larder. Warm panada cannot be shaped and will absorb fat.
- Egg and breadcrumbFlour lightly, then beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs, pressing them on firmly. A second coat of egg and crumb is worthwhile for anything containing chopped egg, which expands and pushes at a weak seam.
- Frying temperatureDeep fat at 180C/360F. Cooler than that and the crumb drinks oil; hotter and the coating colours before the inside is hot.
- Fried parsleyThe garnish wants very dry parsley sprigs dropped into the same fat for a few seconds only, until they stop hissing and turn brilliant green. Wet parsley will spit violently.
- Yield and servingA panada of this size gives six to eight small cutlets, enough for four as a savoury or two as a light lunch with the lemon.
The savoury was the last course of a formal English dinner, served after the sweet and before dessert: something small, hot and sharply seasoned, meant to settle the palate before the port. Curried egg cutlets appear to belong to that repertoire, and to the wider Victorian habit of turning Anglo-Indian seasoning into small croquettes and toasts anything from curried oysters to devilled bones. The croquette technique itself is borrowed from French kitchen practice, where a stiff panada bound with egg was the standard way of making a shaped, fried mouthful out of cooked leftovers; hard-boiled eggs were the cheapest possible filling, which is why the dish turns up in household manuals as readily as in high-class cookery.