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Curried Eggs
Cook six eggs in boiling water twenty minutes, cool, remove the shells, cut into quarters and arrange on a warm dish. Pour over them the following sauce: Rub the bottom of a small frying-pan with onion, pour in one gill of stock and place over the fire. Mix one teaspoon of cornstarch and one-fourth teaspoon of curry powder with one gill of milk and stir into the boiling stock; season with one-third teaspoon of salt and a little pepper, simmer for five minutes and then add one teaspoon of butter. EGGS À LA SUISSE-Cover the bottom of a baking dish with two ounces of fresh butter; overlay this with grated cheese, and on the cheese spread eight eggs taking care not to break the yolks; season with salt and cayenne; pour over the surface a little sweet cream and then strew two ounces of the grated cheese on the top; bake in a moderate oven fifteen minutes.
Two separate dishes are run together here: hard-cooked eggs under a thin curry sauce, and eggs baked between layers of butter and cheese. Both are quick, and both need their timings adjusted.
- A gill is half a cupFour fluid ounces. The sauce is therefore 1/2 cup stock plus 1/2 cup milk, thickened with a single teaspoon of cornstarch — deliberately light, closer to a pouring sauce than a gravy.
- Twenty minutes is too long for the eggsThat yields chalky whites and a grey-green sulphur ring on the yolks. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk that still slices cleanly into quarters.
- Rub the pan with onionCut an onion in half and wipe the cut face over the warm pan base. It is a period trick for a whisper of onion without pieces in a smooth sauce; a very small quantity of grated onion softened in the butter does the same job if you prefer more presence.
- Curry powder has moved onA quarter teaspoon in a cup of liquid is a very light hand by modern standards. Commercial curry powders vary enormously in heat and salt now; taste and increase if it reads as flat, and bloom the powder briefly in the butter rather than stirring it in raw for a rounder flavour.
- Add the butter off the heatThe final teaspoon of butter is there for gloss. Stir it in after the five-minute simmer with the pan off the burner so it emulsifies rather than splitting out as oil.
- Moderate oven means 350FFor the Eggs a la Suisse, 350F (175C). Fifteen minutes at that heat sets the whites and leaves the yolks soft to runny in a shallow dish; a deeper dish or cold eggs will want a few minutes more.
- Cheese and creamA firm dry cheese suits here, Parmesan or a hard Cheddar. "Sweet cream" is simply unsoured cream — ordinary heavy or single cream, a tablespoon or two, not a pool.
- YieldThe curried eggs serve three as a light main or six as part of a breakfast table. The Suisse eggs, with eight eggs, serve four; note that the recipe measures only the two ounces strewn on top and leaves the under-layer of cheese unquantified.
Curry powder had been a British pantry staple for a century by the time this book appeared in 1911, and cooks reached for it most often as a way of making cheap protein interesting — eggs, cold mutton, leftover fish. Curried eggs sit in a long line of such dishes, the spice used as seasoning within a French-style white sauce rather than as the basis of anything resembling an Indian curry; the base here is a stock-and-milk mixture thickened with cornstarch rather than a roux. The second dish, Eggs a la Suisse, appears under that name in English and American cookery writing through the nineteenth century, its Swiss attribution generally traced to nothing more specific than the cheese. Butterick, a pattern company publishing for the home dressmaker and housekeeper, aimed squarely at a household with one servant or none.