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Curried Eggs (Teaspoon curry powder Salt)
4 hard-boiled eggs. 1 cup cream sauce. 1/2 teaspoon curry powder Salt and pepper Chop the eggs; heat thoroughly in the sauce; add curry powder, more salt and pepper, and serve in patty shells or on squares of buttered toast.
This is a fragment of a loose-leaf page: the eggs and the sauce were established in the recipe immediately above it, so the ingredient list here is only the seasoning. Read it as a finishing step rather than a whole dish.
- What the missing base wasMost likely hard-cooked eggs in a white sauce; a thin sauce (something on the order of 1 tablespoon butter, 1 tablespoon flour and 1 cup milk) is what would let the mixture spoon neatly into shells, but the original proportions are not recoverable from this page.
- Curry powder wants heat before liquidHalf a teaspoon stirred into a finished sauce tastes raw and dusty. Cook it in the butter for thirty seconds before adding the flour, or bloom it in a little of the hot sauce and stir that back in.
- Heat thoroughly, but gently"Heat thoroughly" means a couple of minutes at a bare simmer, no more. Chopped hard-cooked whites turn squeaky and weep water if held hot for long, so assemble at the last moment.
- Patty shellsThese were baked puff-pastry cases, made at home or bought from a bakery. Frozen puff-pastry vol-au-vent cases or store-bought pastry shells are the direct equivalent; toast squares are the plainer option the recipe allows.
- Seasoning orderThe recipe adds "more salt and pepper" after the curry powder, so taste at that stage: blends vary in pungency and will change how seasoned the sauce reads.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine fashion in American households from the 1890s through the 1910s: a spirit lamp under a shallow pan let a hostess cook at the table, without a kitchen or a servant, which suited late suppers, bachelor rooms and college quarters. The repertoire was narrow by necessity — creamed and curried things, welsh rarebit, lobster Newburg, scrambles — because a chafing dish does one thing well, which is hold a sauce just below a simmer. Whether this recipe belongs to that fashion is not something the page itself tells us. Curry powder itself had been sold ready-blended in Britain and America since the late eighteenth century, and by Mrs. Fryer's day it functioned less as Indian cooking than as a familiar way to make a white sauce interesting.