Rice. The cooking of rice is the principal part in preparing a dish of curry.
The rice must be snowy white in appearance and so dry when cooked that each grain is perfectly detached.
Wash your rice in ten waters so as to get rid of all floury dust. Have a saucepan ready with boiling water (in the proportion of three pints to a quarter of a pound of rice) with a good pinch of salt. Pour the rice into the saucepan and boil fast with the lid partly off (so that it does not boil over) for twelve minutes. Drain off nearly all the water, then shutting the lid tight, put the saucepan at the side of the stove for the rice to finish cooking in its own steam. At the end of twenty minutes the rice will be cooked and dry. Care must be taken not to let it burn.
Curried Eggs. Fry lightly together one large Spanish onion cut into rings and one or two tomatoes cut in four for about ten minutes without allowing the onion to brown. Add a little good beef stock and go on cooking in the frying pan for another twenty minutes, add then a tablespoonful or more of curry powder and stir in the sauce. Four to six hard-boiled eggs each cut into four are to be laid in the centre of the frying pan and sauce turned over them with a spoon, after being thickened with a little flour and water mixed smoothly. At the end of five minutes lay the eggs down the centre of a dish and pour the curry over them.
For meats or chicken, which would be already cooked, or for prawn curries, proceed as above but take care to put meat or prawns in the pan ten minutes after the stock has been added, and boil for ten minutes before adding the curry and five minutes more afterwards.
53. Mayonnaise
For Salmon, Lobster, and Cold Fowl
Salmon. Cover with cold water in an earthenware saucepan two pounds of salmon cutlets. A strainer should be laid at the bottom of the saucepan. Add a little salt and a teaspoonful of vinegar. Cook for thirty minutes. Dish on a flat dish and place on ice. Arrange on a bed of sliced cucumber and lettuce and pour the mayonnaise over.
To make the mayonnaise put the yolks of two eggs in a pastry bowl, and, while stirring with a spoon, keep adding drop by drop the best Lucca salad oil to the amount of a teacupful. When all the oil is used, stir in a teaspoonful of Tarragon vinegar. It is imperative that nothing should be added to the yolks before the oil, or the mayonnaise will not rise. For the same reason you must stir always the same way. To make a larger quantity add half a teacupful of oil for each yolk, and a quarter of a teaspoonful of Tarragon vinegar. If possible a mayonnaise should not be made more than half an hour before it is required.
Fowl. The chicken should be carved and laid on a bed of mixed salad with a few slices of beet-root round the outside of the dish.