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Fried Eggs with Curry
Heat a half teaspoon melted butter in small black frying pan, dredge in half saltspoon curry powder, then carefully crack two fresh eggs into the pan. Season with one saltspoon salt, half saltspoon pepper and half saltspoon curry powder. Fry for one and a half minutes on one side, turn over by a rapid movement of the handle of the pan and fry one and a half minutes again, then slide on a hot dish. Proceed to prepare five ether portions in the same way, then send to table.
A plain fried egg with curry powder bloomed in the butter first, cooked to order in single portions. The only real technique here is the pan flip, and the only real risk is scorching the spice.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So the seasoning per two eggs works out to about 1/4 tsp curry powder total, 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper — the salt is generous for two eggs and worth scaling back to taste.
- ButterHalf a teaspoon of butter in a modern pan will not go far. Use a teaspoon or more unless the pan is very well seasoned or nonstick; the curry powder needs enough fat to disperse in.
- "Small black frying pan"Most likely a small cast iron or blued carbon steel skillet; the recipe gives no dimensions, but it wants a pan small enough that two eggs can be turned as one piece.
- Don't scorch the curryCurry powder contains turmeric, coriander and often fenugreek, all of which turn bitter fast in hot fat. Dredge it in over moderate heat and get the eggs in within a few seconds, not over the high heat you would use for crisp-edged fried eggs.
- The flipTurning eggs "by a rapid movement of the handle" means a jerk of the wrist rather than a spatula. It works when the pan is slick and the whites have set into a single sheet; if in doubt, use a thin spatula, since a broken yolk here is not recoverable.
- TimingThree minutes total gives set whites and a yolk that is just past runny. For a soft yolk, cut the second side to 30-45 seconds.
- Yield"Five ether portions" is a printer's slip for "five other portions" — twelve eggs, six servings of two. Cooked in sequence, the first plates will be cold by the last, so either hold them in a 200F oven or accept that this is a dish for two or three people.
The International Cook Book belongs to a wave of early twentieth-century American compendia that promised the dishes of every nation to a single household cook, usually filtered through professional restaurant practice. Curry powder itself is a British commercial invention rather than an Indian one — a pre-blended, shelf-stable approximation of the spice mixtures ground fresh in South Asian kitchens, advertised in Britain from the 1780s onward and generally traced to the East India trade. By the time this book appeared, it was applied freely to eggs, soups, cream sauces and leftover meat, which is how a fried egg came to be filed under the world's kitchen. The instruction to make each portion separately in a small pan, then "send to table," reads plausibly as the voice of a hotel kitchen: eggs to order, one pan at a time, never held.