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Poached Eggs, Curry Sauce
Prepare twelve poached eggs. Have a large hot dish with six hot toasts on it; place two eggs on each toast. Evenly divide a curry sauce over the eggs and serve.
A composed dish rather than a formula: everything depends on the curry sauce, which the book assumes you have already made or can turn to elsewhere in its pages.
- The sauce is the recipeNothing here tells you how to make the curry sauce; in books of this kind it is generally a standing preparation, typically a velouté or béchamel finished with curry powder cooked in butter. Make or source that first; the eggs themselves are quick.
- Poaching twelve eggsUse the freshest eggs you can get so the whites hold together, water at a bare shiver rather than a boil, and a splash of vinegar. Poach in batches, slide them into cold water to stop the cooking, then reheat for thirty seconds in hot salted water just before serving — a practical way to get twelve eggs onto the dish at once.
- DonenessA liquid yolk running into the sauce suits the dish, though the recipe does not specify. Roughly three minutes at a simmer for a large egg; the white set and the yolk still fluid.
- The toastCut thick, from a firm white loaf, and toast it dry rather than buttering it heavily — sauce plus butter plus soft toast collapses.
- Hot dish, hot toastThe instruction to have the platter and the toast hot is not decoration. Poached eggs and a flour-thickened sauce both lose heat fast on a cold plate.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each, as written — a luncheon or supper dish rather than a first course.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powders of the period are generally reckoned to have been milder and more turmeric-forward than many blends sold now. Cook whatever you use in fat before it goes into the sauce; raw powder stirred into finished sauce tastes dusty.
Poached eggs under a curry sauce belong to the Anglo-American hotel repertoire of the late nineteenth century, when curry powder had, by most accounts, been a British grocery staple for something like a century and had crossed to American kitchens as a sauce flavouring rather than as a cuisine. In a professional kitchen the dish costs almost nothing: the curry sauce is a batch of basic white sauce pulled from the stove and seasoned, and the eggs are poached to order. It says a good deal about how the period understood foreign cooking: a familiar technique with an imported seasoning laid over it, served on toast. The International Cook Book is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the terse, assumes-you-know-the-sauce phrasing runs throughout.