June 23, 2015

Finest Hour 114, Spring 2002

Page 43

By Georgina Landemare, the Churchill family cook, 1940s-1950s, updated and annotated for the modern kitchen by Barbara Langworth ([email protected]).

Only a very short letter this. Here I am in camp at this arid place—bare as a plate & hot as an oven. All the skin is burnt off my face and my complexion has assumed a deep mulberry… “

—WSC to his mother Rajankunte Camp, Madras, India, 21 January 1897 (Winston S. Churchill, Companion Volume I, Part 2, edited by Randolph S. Churchill, London: Heinemann, 1967, p. 726; also available from Churchill Archives, http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/Churchill_papers/

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MADRAS EGGS (SERVES FOUR)

4 hard-boiled eggs, sliced
6 small tomatoes, skinned, seeded & sliced
4 oz. chopped cooked ham
2 small shallots, finely chopped
6 Tb curry sauce*
4 oz. cooked rice
Salt and pepper
Butter

Butter a one-quart fireproof dish well. Using half the amounts place first a layer of tomato, then of eggs sprinkled with shallot, pepper and salt, next a layer of curry sauce and of chopped ham. Repeat these layers and cover the top with boiled rice and knobs of butter. Bake in a moderate oven [350 °F] for 1/2 – 3/4 hour.

* Curry Sauce

3 medium-sized onions, diced
2 oz. butter
1 dessertspoon [2 tsp] curry powder
1 blade [clove] garlic
1 oz [scant 4 TB] flour
1/2 pint [10 oz.] meat stock (or broth, bouillon)
Salt and pepper

Fry onions in melted butter until soft. Add curry powder, garlic, flour and seasoning and fry slowly until it leaves the sides of the pan. Gradually stir in stock and cook for 30 minutes. Strain [use coarse sieve] and use as required.

Curry is not one spice but a mixture of many. I was amused by author Brent Thompson’s explanation on the Curry House website: “The term curry itself isn’t really used in India, except as a term appropriated by the British generically to categorize a large set of different soup/stew preparations ubiquitous in India. [It] nearly always contains ginger, garlic, onion, turmeric, chile, and oil (except in communities which eat neither onion nor garlic, of course) which must have seemed all the same to the British, being all yellow/red, oily, spicy/aromatic, and too pungent to taste anyway.”