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Eggs, Pondicherry
Boil a pint of white broth in a saucepan, add three ounces raw rice, half teaspoon curry powder, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne, half teaspoon freshly chopped parsley and one ounce freshly grated fresh cocoanut. Mix well and gently boil thirty-five minutes. Cut eight shelled hard-boiled eggs in quarters and add to the rice with a gill cream, half ounce butter and three saltspoons salt; mix well, and cook for five minutes, mixing once in a while. Dress the eggs in a deep dish and serve.
A curried rice-and-egg dish from the era when "curry powder" was a standard tin in a professional French-American kitchen. The whole thing works if the rice is right and the eggs go in only at the end.
- White brothA pale, unbrowned stock — veal or chicken made from unroasted bones, unsalted or lightly salted. A good low-sodium chicken stock stands in; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy the colour.
- Gill and saltspoonA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz). A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of cayenne is half a teaspoon — genuinely hot — and three saltspoons of salt at the end is three-quarters of a teaspoon on top of the half teaspoon already in the pot. Season by taste rather than by the letter, especially if your stock is salted.
- Rice quantity and timingThree ounces of raw rice is a scant half cup, cooked in a pint of broth: a generous ratio that gives a loose, creamy result rather than separate grains. Thirty-five minutes of gentle boiling reflects an older, slower way of handling rice; modern long-grain is done in 18-20 minutes and will collapse if held that long. Check at 20 minutes and add broth if it dries before the grain is tender.
- Fresh coconutOne ounce grated fresh coconut is roughly a third of a cup, loosely packed. Frozen grated coconut, thawed, is the closest substitute. Desiccated sweetened coconut is not — it will sugar the dish.
- Curry powderHalf a teaspoon in a pint of broth is mild by current standards. Period blends tended to lean on coriander and turmeric rather than heat, so with a hotter modern blend the half teaspoon given may be all you want; blooming it in the butter gives better flavour than boiling it in stock.
- The eggsQuartered hard-boiled eggs go in for five minutes only, and are stirred sparingly. Longer, or rougher, and the yolks crumble into the rice and the whites turn squeaky. Fold, do not beat.
- YieldEight eggs and a half cup of rice serves four as a lunch or supper dish, or six alongside something else. Serve in a warmed deep dish as directed — it slackens and cools quickly.
Pondichéry, on the Coromandel coast, was the capital of French India and remained under French administration until 1954, when it was transferred de facto to India (the treaty was ratified in 1962) — which may be why a dish of eggs, rice, curry powder and coconut carried a French colonial place-name onto American hotel menus rather than an Indian one. Filippini's International Cook Book gathers hundreds of such entries, and its "curry" recipes belong to the international grand-hotel repertoire of the period: a commercial curry powder, a light white stock, cream and butter, applied to a French method. The result is closer to a curried egg pilaf, and a first cousin to the kedgerees and egg curries that were moving through British kitchens at the same moment. The insistence on freshly grated fresh coconut suggests a kitchen with someone on hand to do the grating, at a time when sweetened shredded coconut sold for cake was the common shortcut.