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Curry Sauce
Brown in a saucepan to a good golden colour in one ounce butter one medium-sized, sound, chopped-up onion; add one once lean, finely chopped ham, half branch of the white part of celery chopped, half-chopped green pepper, one sprig thyme, one clove, ten whole black peppers and half a sliced leek. Mix thoroughly with the wooden spoon while cooking for five minutes. Season with two saltspoons salt, adding one liberal teaspoon good curry powder and half a tablespoon flour. Mix well, then pour in a good half pint boiling water (if consomme or chicken broth is at hand, use it in place of the water). Gently mix again and allow to slowly cook for eighteen minutes, meanwhile lightly stirring at the bottom occasionally. Dilute one egg yolk in a tablespoon cream and add it to the curry sauce; mix well, but do not allow to boil again. Strain through a sieve into another saucepan. N. B. Unless otherwise mentioned, a "tablespoon flour" means to be about a level, not a heaping, tablespoonful.
A classic French-style curry sauce: an aromatic base, a light roux, stock, and an egg-and-cream liaison at the finish. It is a sauce for poached chicken, eggs, shellfish or rice, not a curry in the South Asian sense.
- The hinge: the liaisonOnce the yolk and cream go in, the sauce must not return to a boil or the yolk will curdle into threads that no straining will fully rescue. Pull the pan off the heat, temper a ladle of hot sauce into the yolk and cream first, then stir that back in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of salt. Adjust down if you use commercial stock in place of water.
- Half a pintAbout a cup, 8 fl oz, and the recipe's "a good half pint" means a generous one rather than a level cup. Almost certainly the 16-ounce American pint rather than the imperial. Chicken broth gives a better sauce than water.
- The flourThe author's own note is worth heeding: a level half tablespoon, roughly 1.5 teaspoons. With one ounce of butter that is a very light roux, and the sauce is meant to be a pouring consistency, thickened as much by the yolk as by the flour.
- Curry powder"Good curry powder" at this period meant a commercial blend, generally turmeric-heavy and mild. Any modern Madras-style blend works; cook it briefly in the fat before the liquid goes in so the spices bloom rather than tasting raw and dusty.
- Whole aromaticsThe clove, the ten peppercorns and the thyme sprig are there to be strained out, so leave them whole. Push the solids firmly against the sieve to extract the onion and ham flavour, then discard.
- The hamAn ounce of lean ham is a seasoning, not a component. Prosciutto ends, a scrap of country ham or unsmoked bacon all serve; omit it and you lose depth but the sauce still works.
- Yield and timingSomewhat under a cup of finished sauce after the simmer. Roughly forty minutes start to finish, including the eighteen-minute simmer.
The International Cook Book belongs to the grand-hotel tradition, where "curry" meant a French sauce flavoured with an imported spice blend rather than a dish built from whole spices ground to order. The technique here is straight out of the classical repertoire: a mirepoix-and-ham base, a light roux, a long slow simmer, a straining, and a finishing liaison of yolk and cream. Commercial curry powder was a British trade product of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a pre-mixed approximation of Indian masalas sold to cooks who had no access to the originals, and by 1900 it had passed into continental kitchens as simply another jar on the spice shelf. Sauces like this one were ladled over poached chicken, hard-boiled eggs, shrimp or plain boiled rice and appeared on menus as "a l'indienne" - a gesture toward India filtered through two intermediaries.