Curry Sauce
1 tablespoon chopped onion 1 tablespoon butter 1½ tablespoons flour 1 teaspoon curry powder 1 cup boiling water 1/2 teaspoon salt 1 tablespoon lemon juice Cook the onion in the butter until it is slightly browned; add the curry powder and flour and mix thoroughly. Add the water gradually; bring to a boil; add salt and lemon juice; strain and serve.
A plain flour-thickened curry sauce of the early twentieth-century American type — closer to a velouté seasoned with curry powder than to anything South Asian. It comes together in about ten minutes.
- Bloom the powder in the fatThe instruction to add curry powder with the flour and cook it in the butter is the hinge of the recipe. Raw curry powder stirred into finished sauce tastes dusty and harsh; thirty seconds to a minute in hot butter is what makes it read as a sauce rather than a seasoning.
- YieldAbout one cup, which at a quarter-cup a head would stretch to four modest servings over rice, hard-cooked eggs, or leftover chicken or lamb. Double it if it is the main sauce for a meal.
- Boiling water, not coldThe recipe calls for the water already boiling, as many sauces of the period do. Add it in a thin stream while whisking, not all at once.
- Curry powder has changedCommercial curry powders of the period were generally milder than a fresh modern blend, and ground spice kept in a tin loses strength with time. Start with the teaspoon called for and taste before adding more.
- ConsistencyOne and a half tablespoons of flour to a cup of liquid falls between a thin and a medium sauce: pourable, and it will thicken further as it stands. Add a splash more water if it tightens too much before serving.
- On strainingStraining removes the onion and gives a smooth, uniform sauce. Skip it if you would rather keep the texture — nothing else in the recipe depends on it.
- Add the lemon lastAs written, the juice goes in after the sauce has come to a boil, at the very end. Acid worked in earlier can thin a flour-bound sauce and dulls the brightness that is the sauce's only fresh note.
Curry sauce of this kind belongs to the long Anglo-American domestication of Indian cooking: commercial curry powder was on sale in Britain from the late eighteenth century onward, and was folded into the existing repertoire of butter-and-flour sauces taught in cookery schools. In the domestic-science tradition, a cook learned one white sauce and then varied it, and curry powder was one such variation alongside mustard, cheese and parsley. Its practical use was economy: a cup of this sauce turned cold cooked meat, boiled eggs or plain rice into something that could be sent to the table as a course.