Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Curry Sauce
Curry Sauce
Peel and slice four onions and two apples, place in a stewpan; add four ounces of butter, six peppercorns, a sprig of thyme, two bay leaves and a blade of mace, and brown the onions over a moderate fire. Mix two tablespoonfuls of curry powder with two tablespoonfuls of flour, and stir it in with the onion mixture; then add one quart of white stock and half a pint of white sauce; season with salt and half a teaspoonful of moist sugar and boil for a quarter of an hour, stirring constantly; strain it through a sieve into another stewpan, boil again, skim, and use when required.
A classic Escoffier-era curry sauce: an onion-and-apple base thickened with roux, extended with stock and b cham el, then strained smooth. It is a mother sauce for reheating meat, poultry, shrimp or eggs, not a finished dish.
- YieldRoughly a quart of finished sauce, or a little less, after the quarter-hour boil, straining and skimming. It keeps a few days refrigerated and freezes in portions.
- White stockA quart of unsalted, unreduced veal or chicken stock. Modern boxed stock is often salted and concentrated; taste before adding the salt called for at the end.
- White sauceHalf a pint (one cup) of b cham el or a plain milk-thickened white sauce, made separately in advance. Oscar assumes it is already standing in the kitchen; make it first or the timing collapses.
- Moist sugarUnrefined soft brown sugar, damp from residual molasses. Light brown sugar is the closest substitute; half a teaspoon is all the recipe wants.
- Blade of maceOne piece of the dried outer covering of nutmeg, not a whole spice bulb. If you only have ground mace, use a scant quarter teaspoon and expect a slightly cloudier sauce.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the period were often milder and more turmeric- and coriander-forward than many blends sold today, though composition varied by maker. Toast the powder briefly with the flour in the butter to cook out the raw taste before the liquid goes in.
- Moderate fireMedium heat. The onions and apples should go deep gold and soft over fifteen to twenty minutes; scorching the roux afterward turns the whole sauce bitter and no amount of straining will fix it.
- Stirring constantlyTake this literally for the quarter-hour boil. A flour-thickened sauce with fruit purée in it catches on the bottom of the pan quickly, and reducing the heat to a bare simmer is safer than a hard boil.
- StrainingThe recipe simply strains through a sieve; pressing some of the apple and onion pulp through adds body and flavour if you want it. The second boil and skim lifts the fat that rises.
Curry sauce of this kind is an Anglo-French construction rather than an Indian one: commercial curry powder reached European kitchens through the British East India trade, and by the late nineteenth century French professional cookery had absorbed it into the standard repertoire as a flavored derivative of velouté or béchamel. The apple and the touch of sugar are the giveaway — they soften and sweeten the spice in a manner characteristic of European adaptation, and the same combination appears in period recipes for kari sauces across English and French manuals. In a hotel kitchen, a sauce like this would plausibly have been made in quantity and held warm, ready to be poured over reheated chicken, shrimp or hard-boiled eggs for the à la carte card — a working preparation, one of the base sauces from which many named dishes on the menu were assembled.