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Curry Sauce
Add to White Sauce one tablespoon curry and a few drops of onion juice. There is less liability of the curry lumping if blended with the flour before adding to butter.
A one-line variation on the book's basic white sauce, and it depends entirely on a sauce recipe printed elsewhere in the chapter. The note about blending the curry with the flour is the whole point of the entry.
- The base sauceWhite sauces of this period commonly ran to about 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour and 1 cup milk, cooked to a medium thickness; the book's own proportions are printed elsewhere in the chapter and should be followed. A cup of milk would give roughly a cup of finished curry sauce.
- Blend the curry with the flourThis is the instruction that matters. Curry powder stirred into finished sauce tends to clump; whisked dry into the flour first, it disperses evenly. Do this before the roux ever meets the butter.
- Cook the spice in the fatOnce flour and curry go into the melted butter, let them bubble a minute or two before the milk. Ground turmeric, coriander and cumin taste raw and dusty otherwise, and the fat carries their flavour into the sauce.
- A tablespoon is a lotCommercial curry powders varied a good deal then as now. With a modern hot blend, start with a teaspoon or two and taste before committing to the full tablespoon.
- Onion juiceMade by grating an onion and pressing the pulp through a sieve, or by squeezing a cut half against a coarse grater. A few drops means just that. Half a teaspoon of grated onion, cooked in the butter first, gives the same effect.
- ServingSauces like this were the standard treatment for hard-boiled eggs, cold mutton or veal, boiled chicken and cauliflower. Thin with a little extra milk or stock if it stiffens on standing.
Curry powder had been a fixture of English and American grocery shelves for over a century by the time this book appeared, sold ready-blended in tins and used less as Indian cookery than as a general seasoning for reheated meat. That is exactly how it functions here: an entry in a chapter of white-sauce variations, built on the same butter-flour-milk foundation that anchored American cooking-school teaching around 1900. The Lowney's book was published by the Walter M. Lowney Company, a Boston chocolate manufacturer, and like other maker-sponsored cookbooks of the era it paired promotion of the house product with a complete, conventional course of instruction in plain cookery. The insistence on blending dry spice with dry flour reflects the method-driven teaching of the Boston cooking-school tradition, where the reason a technique works was considered part of the recipe.