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Curried Eggs (Hard-boiled eggs cup curry)
6 hard-boiled eggs 1 cup curry sauce 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 teaspoon pepper Cut the eggs in half and slice enough of the white off the end of each to make them stand upright. Sprinkle with salt and pepper and serve on a hot platter with the sauce poured around them. 4 eggs
A plated egg dish that depends almost entirely on the sauce the recipe assumes you already have. Read it as a serving idea rather than a full set of instructions.
- The curry sauce is the whole dishThe recipe simply calls for a cup of it and assumes you have the sauce recipe elsewhere in the book. Apart from the salt and pepper on the eggs themselves, nothing here is seasoned, so the sauce has to carry the salt, acid and heat on its own.
- Bloom the curry powderIf you are making the sauce, cook the powder in the butter for a minute before the flour goes in; otherwise it can taste dusty and raw no matter how long it simmers.
- Hard-boiled, not overboiledTwelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water, gives set yolks without the grey-green ring and sulphurous smell that spoil a plain dish like this.
- Trimming the whitesSlicing a sliver off the rounded end so each half stands upright is the point of the presentation. Do it with a thin, wet knife and keep the trimmings for a salad.
- "4 eggs" at the endThe trailing line is ambiguous in the original. Given six eggs in the ingredient list, it most likely records servings rather than quantity; a cup of sauce and twelve halves will serve four as a light course.
- Serve genuinely hotHalved eggs on a cold platter go tepid in a minute. Warm the platter, pour the sauce around rather than over so the yolks stay visible, and take it to the table at once.
- Rounding it outThe original offers no accompaniment. Plain boiled rice or buttered toast points absorb the sauce and turn a garnish-sized dish into lunch.
Curried eggs belong to the long British-and-American domestication of Indian cookery, in which a commercial curry powder stirred into a flour-thickened white sauce stood in for a spice paste built from scratch. By the time household manuals like Mrs. Fryer's appeared, curry powder was a staple grocery item and "curry sauce" was a familiar preparation, ready to be poured over eggs, chicken, rice or leftover fish. Eggs in particular were the thrifty cook's protein, and a chapter of egg dishes might offer a dozen ways to make six of them look like a course; this one does it with nothing more than a knife, a hot platter and a cup of sauce already on the stove.