Curried Eggs II
4 "hard-boiled" eggs. 1 teaspoon curry powder 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 "hard-boiled" eggs 2 tablespoons butter 1/2 tablespoon finely chopped onion 1/8 teaspoon paprika 2 tablespoons flour 1⅓ cups scalded milk 1/2 cup cooked rice Chop whites of eggs and add to sauce made of butter, flour, seasonings, and milk, then add rice; heat to boilingpoint, fill puff paste cases and sprinkle with yolks of eggs rubbed through a sieve.
A curried white sauce bound with flour and milk, folded with chopped egg white and rice and served in pastry shells. The ingredient list runs together in the original; read it as butter, flour, curry powder, salt, paprika and onion for the sauce, milk to thin it, then eggs and rice.
- Cook the curry powder in the butterThe book's white sauces begin by melting the butter, then stirring in the flour and dry seasonings before the milk. The recipe does not say what to do with the chopped onion, but softening it in the butter first is the sensible reading. Raw curry powder stirred into finished sauce tastes dusty; a moment in hot fat is the difference.
- Scalded milkMilk heated to just below boiling, when it steams and shows bubbles at the edge. It was standard practice in the days of unpasteurised milk. Warm milk from the carton works the same way.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons each of butter and flour to 1 1/2 cups milk is a thin-to-medium white sauce. With the rice and egg added it should coat a spoon, not pour. Loosen with a little more milk if it stiffens while standing.
- "Hard-boiled" eggsThe quotation marks look like a flag that the term is a misnomer, the eggs being better cooked gently than literally hard-boiled. Bring them to the boil, cover, take off the heat and leave 12-15 minutes for firm yolks without the grey ring.
- Puff paste casesSmall vol-au-vent shells of puff pastry, baked blind and hollowed. Frozen puff pastry shells are the direct equivalent; toast points or split baking-powder biscuits make a workable substitute.
- The yolk garnishYolks pressed through a fine sieve give the fine golden crumb sometimes called mimosa. Do it just before serving, over the filled cases, or it packs down and loses the effect.
- YieldFour eggs and 1 1/2 cups sauce fill six to eight small pastry cases, enough for four at lunch or supper.
Curried eggs belong to the long Anglo-American appetite for curry powder as a seasoning rather than a cuisine: a commercial blend, sold ready-mixed by grocers through the nineteenth century, stirred into a French-style white sauce. The pattern here is pure Boston Cooking School method, the same butter-flour-milk sauce that runs through Fannie Farmer's chapters on creamed fish, chicken and vegetables, varied only by what is folded into it. Serving that mixture in puff paste cases put a cheap dish of eggs and leftover rice on the luncheon table looking like something from a caterer, which is much of what the book was teaching. The sieved-yolk finish was a standing garnish of the period and turns up on salads and cold fish as well.