Curried Eggs
1 Slice Onion 2 Tablespoons Melted Butter 1/2 Tablespoons Cornstarch 1/2 Tablespoon Flour (Barley) 1 Teaspoon Curry Powder 1/4 Teaspoon Salt 11/4 Cups Milk 5 Hard-boiled Eggs, Cut Lengthwise in Quarters Brown the onion in the butter and add the flour and cornstarch; stir in the milk, flour and cornstarch; stir in the milk, stirring till it thickens , and season. Add the eggs and cook long enough to heat thoroughly.
Serve at once with hot boiled rice.
A white sauce built on browned onion and curry powder, poured over quartered hard-boiled eggs. The printing has a few garbled spots worth sorting out before you start.
- The milk quantity"11/4 Cups" is a broken fraction for 1 1/4 cups. That is the right proportion for roughly 1 tablespoon of combined thickeners and gives a sauce that coats rather than sets.
- The duplicated line"stir in the milk, flour and cornstarch; stir in the milk" is a typesetter's repeat. Do it once: brown the onion, stir the flour and cornstarch into the butter, then add the milk gradually.
- Barley flourThe parenthetical "(Barley)" specifies barley flour, which turns up in home cookery of the period when wheat was being economised. Plain wheat flour substitutes directly here; barley thickens slightly less and tastes faintly nutty.
- Bloom the curry powderThis is the hinge. Old-style curry powder is raw ground spice and tastes dusty if it only warms through in milk. Add it to the butter and onion and let it cook thirty seconds to a minute before the starch goes in.
- Cook out the starchOnce thickened, hold the sauce at a bare simmer two or three minutes. Cornstarch and flour both need that time to lose their pasty edge, and the sauce will thin very slightly as it does.
- The onionOne slice of onion is barely a flavouring; "brown" here means colouring it in the butter for aroma. Chop it if you want it in the finished dish.
- Adding the eggsFold the quarters in off direct heat and give them only a minute or two. Boiled eggs held in hot sauce turn rubbery and the whites begin to shed.
- YieldFive eggs and a cup and a quarter of sauce serve four as a light supper over rice, or two or three as a main dish.
Curried eggs belong to the long Anglo-American afterlife of British Indian cookery, where "curry" had narrowed to mean a commercial spice blend stirred into a flour-thickened cream sauce. Dishes of this kind filled the awkward slot between breakfast and dinner in Victorian and Edwardian households: cheap, made from things always on hand, and respectable enough to serve a guest. Its presence in a bride's cook book may well be part of the point. These volumes were compiled to give a young wife a small, safe repertoire she could execute without a cook, and a curry sauce over hard-boiled eggs demanded no more skill than a plain white sauce plus one spoonful of something from a tin. The specification of barley flour is suggestive rather than decisive: such wheat substitutes are often associated with the years when they were promoted in American kitchens for economy and, during the First World War, for patriotism, though barley flour could equally be a plain economy or dietary choice at other dates.