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East Indian Sauce
Put the yolks of two hard-boiled eggs in a basin and mash them until they are quite smooth; then mix in one teaspoonful of curry powder; pour in gradually one breakfast cupful of salad oil and one-half teacupful of tarragon vinegar. Continue stirring the mixture until it is quite smooth and the ingredients are well incorporated; it is then ready for serving. This sauce is very nice eaten with salad.
A cold curried yolk sauce built like a mayonnaise but with cooked yolks instead of raw ones, which changes how it behaves in the bowl.
- Add the oil slowlyThis is the hinge. Hard-cooked yolks emulsify far less readily than raw ones, so the oil has to go in a few drops at a time at the start, working it into a paste, before you can move to a thin stream. Poured in quickly it will simply pool and separate.
- Breakfast cup and teacupA breakfast cup is roughly 8 to 10 fl oz, so read it as about 1 cup of oil. A teacup is smaller, around 5 to 6 fl oz, making the half teacup of vinegar somewhere near 1/3 cup. The ratio matters more than the absolute figures: about three parts oil to one part vinegar.
- Salad oilIn 1896 this meant a neutral to lightly fruity oil, often olive or cottonseed. Any mild oil works; a strong extra-virgin olive oil will fight the curry powder.
- Curry powderPeriod curry powders were coriander-and-turmeric heavy and comparatively mild. A modern Madras blend is hotter, so taste after a teaspoon before adding more. The recipe has you work the powder into the mashed yolks before any liquid goes in.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, and easy to make by steeping a bruised sprig in white wine vinegar for a week. Plain white wine vinegar plus a pinch of dried tarragon is an acceptable stand-in; cider vinegar is too assertive here.
- Sieve the yolksMashing with a fork leaves grains that never fully disperse. Pushing the yolks through a fine sieve first gives the smooth texture the recipe keeps asking for.
- SeasoningNo salt is specified. It needs a good pinch, and a little sugar if the vinegar is sharp.
- Yield and keepingMakes roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 cups, enough to dress a salad for six to eight. Refrigerate and use within two days; it will thicken and may need slackening with a spoonful of water.
Oscar Tschirky's book appeared in 1896, at the height of the Anglo-American appetite for curry powder as a seasoning rather than as a cuisine. Commercial blends had been sold in London since the late eighteenth century, and by the 1890s the tin was familiar enough to make things "East Indian" or "a l'Indienne" with a single teaspoon. The technique here is older than the flavouring: a sauce built on sieved hard-boiled yolks and oil is the backbone of sauce tartare, and cooks worked with it long before curry powder reached them. Cold curried mayonnaise of this kind went on to have a long career in salads of chicken and rice, the best-known descendant being the coronation chicken devised for the 1953 banquet in London.