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Curried Eggs
Peel six hard-boiled eggs and cut them into slices. Put one teaspoonful each of chopped onions and butter in a fryingpan and stir over the fire until brown; add half a teacupful of flour and curry powder mixed in equal proportions, one breakfast cupful of milk, and season with salt and pepper, and simmer until the onions are soft, then add the eggs. When thoroughly warmed, turn all out onto a dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
A plain curried cream sauce poured over sliced hard-boiled eggs, in the style of the late-Victorian hotel breakfast and supper table. The proportions are the thing to watch: as written the sauce is closer to a paste than a pour.
- The cup measuresA teacupful in this period is usually reckoned at about 6 fl oz, though period sources vary (some treat it as half a pint), so half a teacupful is somewhere around 3 fl oz of flour-and-curry mixture — perhaps 3 tablespoons of each. A breakfast cupful is the larger cup, somewhere in the 8 to 10 fl oz range. Either way the ratio gives a very stiff, very strongly spiced sauce; 2 tablespoons flour to a full cup of milk is the workable version, with curry powder adjusted to taste rather than matched spoon for spoon.
- Soften the onion firstThe recipe does brown the onion in butter before the flour goes in, but it then asks you to simmer "until the onions are soft" after the milk is added, by which point a teaspoon of chopped onion in a thick sauce is unlikely to soften further. Cook the onion in the butter until genuinely translucent as well as lightly browned before any flour touches the pan.
- Bloom the curry powderCurry powder is mostly toasted spice and turns dusty and bitter if it only ever meets liquid. Stir it into the buttery onion with the flour and let it cook a minute over moderate heat before the milk goes in.
- Add the milk graduallyWarm milk added a little at a time and whisked smooth prevents lumps; all at once into a dry roux of this thickness will seize.
- The eggs go in last, brieflyThis is the hinge. Hard-boiled eggs held in a simmering sauce turn tough and the yolks go chalky. Fold the slices in off the direct heat, just long enough to warm through — two or three minutes.
- Croutons"Croutons of fried bread" here means small triangles or dice of white bread fried in butter until crisp, not the dried-out packaged kind. Fry them while the sauce simmers and add at the last moment so they stay crisp.
- YieldSix eggs and a cup of sauce serves three to four as a light supper or breakfast dish, more if spooned over rice or toast.
Curried eggs belong to the long line of British curries built on a flour-thickened white sauce flavoured with commercial curry powder, a blend sold ready-made in London from the late eighteenth century. Dishes of this kind were cheap and fast and made from things a kitchen would have on hand: eggs boiled in quantity, milk, butter, and a tin of spice. The garnish of fried bread croutons is a European habit rather than an Indian one.