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Poached Eggs, Bangalore
Peel and core three large sound apples. Cut each one into four even slices, lightly dip in cold milk and roll in flour. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, arrange the apples in the pan, one beside another, and briskly fry for three minutes on each side. Lift them up, drain on a cloth, sprinkle a teaspoon curry powder over on both sides, evenly divided. Place them on a large dish.
Prepare twelve poached eggs; place an egg on each slice of apple, sprinkle a little chopped parsley on top and serve.
POTATOES, PAILLES (STRAW,) Peel three medium, sound potatoes. Cut them into thin match-shaped strips; wash well in cold water, drain on a cloth, then plunge them into boiling fat and fry for five minutes, or till a nice golden colour, frequently turning them over with the skimmer. Lift up, drain well in a frying basket, dredge half teaspoon salt over them, gently shake in the basket, dress on a hot dish and serve.
Two separate dishes have run together on the page: the curried apple-and-egg dish, and pommes pailles, straw potatoes, which follows as its own recipe. Both are straightforward, but the apple slices are the part that decides whether the first one works.
- Cut the apples thickFour slices from a whole cored apple gives rings a good half-inch or more thick, which is what you want. Thin slices collapse in the pan and will not hold a poached egg.
- Choose a firm appleA variety that holds its shape under heat, such as Braeburn, Granny Smith or Golden Delicious, is essential. Softer dessert apples turn to sauce in the three minutes a side the recipe calls for.
- More butter than statedOne tablespoon will not carry twelve floured apple slices. Work in two or three batches, adding butter as you go, and keep the heat at medium so the flour browns rather than scorches.
- Bloom the curry powderThe recipe sprinkles raw curry powder over the drained apples, which tastes dusty. Warming the powder briefly in the pan butter before frying, or dusting it on while the slices are still hot from the pan, softens the raw edge considerably.
- Poached eggs, timedBarely simmering water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. They can be poached ahead, held in cold water, and reheated for thirty seconds in hot water just before serving, which is the only sane way to manage twelve at once.
- YieldTwelve slices and twelve eggs serves four to six as a luncheon or supper dish. Halve it easily.
- Straw potatoes: fat temperatureThe recipe gives no temperature; "boiling fat" for this kind of frying would be somewhere in the region of 350-375F. Check colour rather than the clock, since thin matchstick strips may colour in two or three minutes rather than the five the recipe allows.
- Straw potatoes: dry themWashing off the surface starch keeps the strips separate, but they must be patted genuinely dry before they go into the fat. Wet potatoes make the fat erupt.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, filled The International Cook Book (1906) with dishes tagged by place names, and "Bangalore" here is doing what "Indienne" does elsewhere in the period: it signals curry powder and nothing more precise. Commercial curry powder had been sold in Britain since the late eighteenth century and reached American kitchens as a single ready-blended tin, used as a seasoning rather than as the foundation of a dish. The pairing of curry with apple was already a fixture of Anglo-Indian cooking by Filippini's day, apple and other fruit being the standard Western softener for the spice mix, and it survives in coronation chicken and in mulligatawny. The layering of a poached egg over a fried round is pure restaurant grammar of the era, the same logic as eggs Benedict; substituting an apple slice for the muffin or the artichoke bottom is the kind of variation a hotel chef was expected to produce endlessly. The straw potatoes that follow are simply pommes pailles, a standard garnish of the French professional kitchen, carrying their own capitalised heading and run into the same paragraph for reasons that are unclear.