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Croutons (Boil eggs till hard peel)
Boil eggs till hard, peel and place in cold water until required. Fry onion in Crisco a few minutes, add curry powder, apple, nuts, and cornstarch moistened with milk. Simmer fifteen minutes. Stir from time to time. If too thick add a little white stock or water. Cut eggs in halves, and lay them in the sauce with the salt to get thoroughly hot through. Put eggs into deep hot dish, strain sauce over them, garnish with croutons and lemon slices.
Eggs
This is a curried-egg dish rather than a crouton recipe — the title comes from the garnish, and the ingredient list that would have stood above the method has been lost in the original page. Quantities have to be reconstructed, so treat the text as a method and scale to taste.
- What is missingNo amounts are given for onion, curry powder, apple, nuts or cornstarch. For six halved eggs (three whole), a workable ratio is one medium onion, one tart apple, a tablespoon of curry powder, two tablespoons of chopped almonds, and a tablespoon of cornstarch slaked in a cup of milk.
- CriscoThe book's own product, an all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening introduced in 1911. Modern Crisco is reformulated and no longer contains partially hydrogenated oil; any neutral oil or butter does the same job here, about two tablespoons.
- Bloom the curry powderThe hinge of the dish. Add the curry powder to the hot fat with the softened onion and cook it thirty seconds to a minute before any liquid goes in, or the sauce tastes raw and dusty. Commercial curry powders of the period were generally turmeric-heavy and coarsely ground; a fresh tin makes a noticeable difference.
- Cornstarch and milkSlake the cornstarch in cold milk before it touches the pan or it will lump. Fifteen minutes of simmering is longer than cornstarch needs to thicken; it presumably also serves to soften the apple and cook out the spice — but a milk sauce on cornstarch scorches easily, so keep the heat low and stir.
- Hard-boiled eggsNote the order: the eggs are peeled first and then held in cold water until wanted. If you chill them before peeling instead, the cold stops the cooking and helps the shells release. Eight to ten minutes off the boil gives a set yolk without the grey ring. Drain the eggs before halving.
- Reheating the eggsLay the halves in the sauce only to warm through, two or three minutes. Longer and the whites turn rubbery and squeak.
- StrainingStraining the sauce discards the onion, apple and nuts entirely, in line with the period's taste for smooth sauces. Spooning it over unstrained gives a far better dish; if you want it smooth, blend rather than strain and keep the body.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Ordinary low-sodium chicken stock is a fair stand-in, and water works, since the milk carries the sauce.
- YieldThree eggs and this quantity of sauce serve two as a light supper with rice or toast, four as part of a larger meal. The croutons and lemon are not optional decoration — the acid and crunch are what keep the dish from being uniformly soft.
Curried eggs belong to the long British and American afterlife of Anglo-Indian cookery, in which curry powder became a pantry staple used to dress up cheap protein — eggs, leftover mutton, tinned fish. The apple-and-nut sweetening is characteristic of that anglicised style rather than of any Indian original, and it survived in home cooking well into the twentieth century. Its appearance in The Story of Crisco (1913) is straightforwardly commercial: the book was published by Procter & Gamble to teach cooks that their new hydrogenated shortening could replace butter and lard in every corner of the kitchen, so recipes were gathered across every course and every technique, frying included. The garbled heading here is a reminder that these promotional volumes were assembled quickly, and that a printed recipe of the period often assumed a cook who already knew roughly how much curry powder went into a sauce.