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Curried Eggs (See cut facing page)
(See cut facing page 186.) INGREDIENTS. 6 eggs, cooked, in water just 2 tablespoonfuls of flour, or below the boiling-point, 1 teaspoonful of corn- 20 minutes. starch. ½ a cup of stock (fish, veal ½ a teaspoonful of curry or chicken). powder. 1/2 a cup of milk.
1 slice of onion. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter.
Teaspoonful of lemon juice.
Salt and pepper to taste.
Method. Cook the onion in the butter a few minutes, then remove it and add the flour and curry powder; when frothy add the milk and stock. As soon as the boiling-point is reached, set the blazer into the hot-water pan and add the eggs cut in quarters. Season with salt and serve on sippets of toast.
Light meats, fish, oysters and lobsters may be prepared in the same way, omitting the half-cup
A curry-flavoured béchamel built in a chafing dish, with quartered hard-cooked eggs folded in at the end. The whole thing takes about fifteen minutes once the eggs are done.
- The eggs are the point"Cooked in water just below the boiling-point, 20 minutes" is the coddling method the Boston school taught, and it still gives the best result: hold the water at 180-190F off the boil, and the whites set tender rather than rubbery with no grey ring on the yolks. Boiling hard for twenty minutes would ruin them.
- Blazer and hot-water panThe blazer is the shallow upper pan of a chafing dish, used over direct flame; the hot-water pan is the bain-marie beneath it. Moving the blazer into the water bath simply drops the sauce below a simmer so the eggs heat through without the sauce breaking. A heavy saucepan pulled off the heat does the same job.
- Flour or cornstarchThe ingredient list offers 2 tablespoons flour or 1 teaspoon cornstarch, which is not an equivalent swap by any modern reckoning. Two tablespoons of flour to one cup of liquid gives a properly thick sauce; a teaspoon of cornstarch would give something barely napping. Use the flour unless you want it loose.
- Bloom the curry powderAdding the curry powder with the flour and cooking until frothy is deliberate: the ground spices need a minute in hot fat to lose their raw dustiness. Do not rush from butter to milk. Commercial curry powders of the period were often turmeric-forward, though blends varied a good deal in heat and composition.
- The lemon juiceA teaspoon is listed but never mentioned in the method. Stir it in off the heat at the very end, after the eggs are warmed through; added earlier there is some risk of the milk curdling.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of toasted bread, cut from a thin slice with the crusts off. Two or three to a plate, arranged under and around the eggs.
- The truncated last lineThe variation sentence breaks off at "omitting the half-cup". The recipe applies the same treatment to light meats, fish, oysters and lobsters, but which half-cup is to be left out — the milk or the stock — cannot be recovered from the page as printed. Any completion of the sentence is inference, not the original text.
- YieldSix eggs in about a cup of sauce serves three as a light supper or four at a chafing-dish party.
This comes from the height of the American chafing-dish vogue, roughly the 1890s through the 1910s, when a nickel or copper chafing dish was, by common account, a favourite wedding present and cooking at the table — after the theatre, in a bachelor's rooms, at a late supper — was fashionable in a way that reheated leftovers at the stove was not. The dish itself is Anglo-Indian by descent: curry powder, a pre-blended mixture sold by British grocers from the late eighteenth century onward and often described as turmeric-forward, was the standard means by which English and then American kitchens gestured at Indian cookery without any of its actual technique. Eggs, cold meat, oysters and lobster all took the same treatment, as this recipe's closing line makes explicit. What is genuinely good here is not the curry but the egg method — twenty minutes below boiling, which the Boston Cooking School faculty argued for consistently against the older habit of hard-boiling, and which modern cooks arrived at again by a different route.