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Curried Egg Tartlets
Line some small tartlet moulds with very fine paste and cook them in the oven after filling them with raw rice; when they are baked empty the rice and unmould and leave them in a dry place. Boil a few eggs till quite hard and cut the whites into very small dice; mix them in with some creamy curry sauce, adding a little chutney. Just when prepared to serve fill the tartlets with this preparation and bestrew them with the yolks rubbed through a sieve so that the entire surfaces are covered. Serve on a dish covered with a napkin.
A canapé-scale dish that depends entirely on contrast: crisp shell, warm creamy filling, dry powdery yolk on top. Assemble it at the last possible moment or all three collapse into one texture.
- "Very fine paste"A short, unsweetened pastry rolled thin; a pâte brisée works. The recipe gives no thickness, so roll it as thin as the moulds will take so the shells stay crisp under a moist filling.
- Blind baking with riceThis is the same technique as modern pie weights: line the moulds, fill with raw rice, bake, then tip the rice out. Line the pastry with parchment first or the grains embed themselves in the dough. The recipe specifies no heat or time; a moderately hot oven until the shells are set and pale gold, then a few minutes more empty to dry the base.
- Curry sauceMost likely a flour-thickened white sauce enriched with cream and seasoned with curry powder, in the manner usual for the period; the recipe itself gives no formula. Whatever the base, it should be thick enough to mound on a spoon, not pourable, or it will soak the shells.
- ChutneyProbably one of the sweet bottled mango chutneys then sold commercially; the recipe does not specify. Chop it fine — whole chunks of fruit throw the texture off at this size.
- Hard-boiled eggsTen to twelve minutes in barely simmering water, then straight into cold water. Longer gives the grey-green ring at the yolk and a sulfurous edge that fights the curry.
- The sieved yolkPush the yolks through a fine sieve directly over the filled tartlets so they fall in loose crumbs. Pressed or stirred, they clump. The effect is what French kitchens call mimosa, and the instruction to cover the entire surface is aesthetic — no filling should show.
- TimingShells can be baked a day ahead and kept dry and airtight; sauce and diced whites can be prepared in the morning. Fill and garnish within minutes of serving.
- Yield and serviceThe recipe gives no numbers; "a few eggs" is all it offers. As a rough guide, six eggs and about a cup of sauce will fill something like two dozen small tartlets. The napkin on the serving dish is a standard period presentation touch.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 cook book records the kind of small savoury that could be made in quantity: little pastry cases filled and eaten standing up. Curry had been thoroughly domesticated in Anglo-American cookery by the 1890s, arriving through British India and settling into hotel kitchens as a mild, cream-thickened sauce built on a French base rather than anything resembling an Indian preparation — commercial curry powder and bottled mango chutney were staple grocery items on both sides of the Atlantic by then. Curried eggs in particular were a standby of the period, cheap and meatless. The sieved-yolk finish, later widely called mimosa for its resemblance to the flower, was a common way to dress egg dishes in the era and shows up across French and Anglo-American cookery of the time.