Curried Eggs
2 tablespoonfuls Crisco 6 hard-cooked eggs 1 small chopped onion 1 chopped sour apple 2 teaspoonfuls curry powder 1 lemon 4 chopped butternuts, or 6 chopped almonds 3 tablespoonfuls cornstarch 2 cupfuls milk 1/2 teaspoonful salt
The Crisco book prints this as a bare ingredient list, which was common in promotional cookbooks of the period — the method was assumed. What follows fills in the gaps a modern cook needs.
- No method givenThe list implies a curry-flavoured white sauce: melt the fat, soften the onion and apple in it, stir in the curry powder and cornstarch, then add the milk gradually and cook until thick. The quartered or halved eggs would go in at the end, only long enough to heat through.
- CriscoAn all-vegetable hydrogenated shortening, first sold in 1911 and the reason this book exists. Any neutral solid shortening or an equal amount of butter or oil works; the flavour of butter is an improvement here.
- Cornstarch quantityThree tablespoons of cornstarch to two cups of milk gives a distinctly thick sauce rather than a pouring one. Two tablespoons produces something better suited to spooning over toast or rice.
- ButternutsThe nut of Juglans cinerea, the white walnut, once common in the American Northeast and now scarce because of canker disease. English walnuts are the nearest substitute; the recipe's own alternative of almonds is easier to find.
- Sour appleA cooking apple with real acidity — Granny Smith, Bramley, or a firm russet. A modern sweet eating apple will leave the sauce flat, since the apple is doing the job of an acid as much as a fruit.
- The lemonThe list says "1 lemon" without saying how. Juice is the sensible reading: add it off the heat at the end, or the milk sauce may curdle. Wedges served alongside are also plausible.
- Curry powderCommercial curry powder in 1913 was mild and turmeric-heavy. Toast it briefly in the fat with the onion before the milk goes in — raw curry powder stirred into a finished sauce tastes dusty.
- Yield and servingSix eggs and two cups of sauce feed four as a light supper. Buttered toast, boiled rice, or a border of mashed potato are the usual accompaniments for a dish of this kind.
The Story of Crisco was published by Procter & Gamble in 1913, two years after Crisco went on sale, and it is a sales document as much as a cookbook: every recipe exists to show that a hydrogenated cottonseed-oil shortening could stand in for butter and lard across the whole range of American cooking. Curried eggs themselves are older and come by way of British India, where curried hard-boiled eggs in a mild spiced sauce were a standing breakfast and supper dish in Anglo-Indian households; the version that reached American cookbooks in the late nineteenth century is often described as having been softened into a curry-tinted white sauce, with apple and lemon supplying the sweet-sour note that fresh chutney would have provided at the other end of the journey. The chopped nuts, and the choice of butternut in particular, are harder to account for.