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Curried Vegetables
Make a sauce of one-fourth a cup, each, of butter and flour, one tablespoonful of curry powder, half a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of pepper and a pint of milk; add half a teaspoonful of onion juice, one cup of cooked peas, half a cup, each, of potato balls, turnips cut into cubes or fanciful shapes, and carrots cut into straws.
Potatoes à la Maître d'Hôtel.
INGREDIENTS.
1 pint of potato balls, cut with French cutter, and cooked tender, may be used either hot or cold.
1 cup of milk. 2 tablespoonfuls of butter. 2 yolks of eggs.
1 tablespoonful of lemon juice.
1 tablespoonful of parsley, finely chopped. 1/2 a teaspoonful of salt.
A dash of pepper.
Method. - Heat the milk and potatoes in the blazer over hot water. Cream the butter and add the yolks of the eggs, beating them in well; add the parsley and seasonings, mix thoroughly, and, when the potatoes are hot and have absorbed part of the milk, stir the egg and butter into them; add the lemon juice and serve at once.
Two chafing-dish vegetable dishes run together on one page: a curried cream sauce poured over cooked vegetables, and potato balls finished with an egg-and-butter liaison. Both assume a blazer set over a hot-water pan, which is simply a double boiler.
- The blazer and the hot-water panA chafing dish has two parts: the blazer (the upper pan, usable over direct flame) and the water pan beneath it. Every instruction here that says "over hot water" means the blazer sits in the water pan; a stainless bowl or saucepan over simmering water does the same job.
- The vegetables go in cookedThe curried dish is an assembly, not a braise. The recipe calls for cooked peas and gives no cooking time for the rest, so the turnip, carrot and potato balls are evidently meant to go in cooked tender and drained, with the sauce only reheating them. Add them in order of sturdiness and give them a few minutes to warm through.
- Sauce proportionsA quarter cup each of butter and flour to a pint (2 cups) of milk works out at about 2 tablespoons of flour per cup, a medium-bodied bechamel, thick enough to coat wet vegetables without sliding off. Cook the roux and curry powder together a minute before the milk goes in so the spice loses its raw edge.
- Curry powder then and nowCommercial curry powders of the period were generally mild and turmeric-forward. One tablespoon in a pint of sauce reads as gentle; if you are using a hot Madras blend, start with two teaspoons and taste.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion on a fine grater and use the liquid that collects, or press grated onion through a sieve. Half a teaspoon is a background note, not a flavour you should be able to name.
- Potato balls and the French cutterThe "French cutter" is a parisienne scoop, what most kitchens call a melon baller. Allow two or three large potatoes for a pint of balls, depending on how closely you scoop; the trimmings are worth keeping for mash.
- The egg liaison is the hingeIn the maitre d'hotel potatoes the creamed butter and yolks go in at the very end, off direct heat, with only the hot water beneath. If the mixture is allowed to boil the yolks scramble and the sauce breaks into curds and butter. Stir until it thickens and glosses, then add the lemon juice and serve.
- On the yolksHeld over hot water rather than cooked through, the yolks in the second dish may not reach a temperature that pasteurises them. Use pasteurised eggs if serving anyone who should avoid lightly cooked egg.
- YieldNeither recipe gives a yield. On the quantities stated, each will serve about four as a side, or two or three as a supper course.
Chafing-dish cookery had a considerable vogue in American households around 1900, when it belonged less to the kitchen than to the parlour, the club room and the late supper after the theatre; the appeal is often said to have been that a hostess could cook in front of her guests without servants. Both dishes here reflect that setting: everything arrives at the table already boiled and only needs saucing. The curry is the mild Anglo-American kind, a legacy of British curry powder reaching the United States through cookbooks and grocers rather than through Indian cooking itself, and it turns up constantly in this period applied to eggs, chicken and leftover vegetables. "A la maitre d'hotel" is standard French kitchen shorthand for a finish of butter, parsley and lemon, traditionally traced to the steward's plain house style, though the addition of egg yolks here pushes it closer to a sauce batarde than to a simple maitre d'hotel butter.