Curried Eggs
Slice two onions and fry in butter, add a table-spoon curry-powder and one pint good broth or stock, stew till onions are quite tender, add a cup of cream thickened with arrowroot or rice flour, simmer a few moments, then add eight or ten hard-boiled eggs, cut in slices, and beat them well, but do not boil. - Mrs. E. L. Fay, Washington Heights.
A late-nineteenth-century curry sauce built on stock and cream, with sliced hard-boiled eggs folded in at the end. It comes together in about half an hour and wants rice or toast underneath it.
- "Beat them well" is a typo for heat"Beat them well" is almost certainly a misprint for heat -- slices of hard-boiled egg beaten into a sauce would collapse into shreds. The intent is to warm them through in the finished sauce off a hard boil, two or three minutes, which is also why the recipe says not to boil: the cream can break and the yolks turn chalky.
- Curry-powder of the periodVictorian curry powder was built on turmeric, coriander and fenugreek; some blends were mild, others carried a good deal of cayenne, so the heat varied. A tablespoon of a modern hot Madras blend may read much sharper; start with two teaspoons and taste, and bloom it in the butter with the onions for a minute so the raw spice cooks off.
- Arrowroot or rice flourBoth are still sold. Use about 2 teaspoons slaked in a little cold cream, and add it off the boil; arrowroot thins again if held at a hard simmer, which is a second reason for the low heat. Cornstarch works but gives a slightly duller finish.
- A pint of stockAmerican pint, 2 cups. With a cup of cream that gives three cups of sauce, thick enough to coat but not gluey. If it is loose after the arrowroot goes in, reduce the stock a little before the cream rather than adding more starch.
- Stewing the onionsTwo sliced onions in a pint of stock need 20-25 minutes to go genuinely tender. The sauce is not strained, so slice them thin; some cooks of the period pressed the whole thing through a sieve for a smooth curry sauce, which is worth doing if you want it refined.
- The eggsEight to ten is a lot of egg for three cups of sauce, which tells you this was a supper dish, not a garnish. Cook them 10 minutes, cool in cold water, and slice with a wet knife so the yolks do not crumble.
- YieldServes six generously over rice, or four as a main supper dish. The sauce does not reheat well once the eggs are in, so make only what will be eaten.
Curried eggs belong to the long British-Indian current that reached American cookbooks through English household manuals: curry powder was a shop-bought convenience in Britain from the late eighteenth century, and by the later nineteenth century it was widely available in the United States. This recipe carries Mrs. E. L. Fay's name and neighborhood in the manner of a community cookbook, where a recipe's authority came from the woman who vouched for it. The dish itself follows the standard Anglo-American curry formula of the era, onions softened in butter, curry powder, stock, and cream thickened with arrowroot, into which almost any cooked protein could be folded. Eggs made it an inexpensive supper dish in households that kept hens, and arrowroot, a West Indian import that was also a nursery and invalid food, was often preferred to flour for a sauce meant to look clear and glossy rather than pasty.