Pieathalon! Curried Egg Pie

Welcome to the 1st Annual Pieathalon! A dozen intrepid cooking bloggers are running laps around their kitchen, simultaneously baking pies and shooting at targets. (Well, ok, we aren’t actually target shooting, but biathlon is one of my favorite sports. I like to imagine it originated when skiers were actually shooting at each another, and the civilized, humane, modern version uses targets instead.)

The brainchild of the blogger behind Dinner Is Served 1972, the Pieathalon concept is pretty simple: Contribute a recipe for (a) pie, either sweet or savory, (b) from your collection that (c) has a photograph so we know what it’s supposed to look like. Here’s who’s cooking what…

Brian of Caker Cooking — Chess Pie
Ruth of Mid Century Menu — Avocado Lime Pie
Mimi of The Retro WW Experiment –- Nesselrode Pie
Me -– Curried Egg Pie
Jenny of Silver Screen Suppers — Mile-High Lemon Chiffon Pie
S.S. of A Book of Cookrye — Upside Down Chicken Pie
Sarah of Directionally Challenged Cooking — Simone’s Pet Strawberry Pie
Kelli of Kelli’s Kitchen — Butterscotch Pie
Ashley of A Pinch of Vintage — Schoolteacher Pie
Poppy of Granny Pantries — Black Bottom Pie
Carrie of Ginger Lemon Girl — Chocolate “Pie”
Emily of Dinner is Served 1972 — Seafoam Cantaloupe Pie

This is Curried Egg Pie, kindly provided for us from the Dinner is Served 1972 recipe card collection.

For 4 people you need:
6 hard-cooked eggs
1 onion
1 medium-sized apple
2 tablespoons shortening
3 tablespoons flour
1 tablespoon curry powder
3/4 cup water
juice of 1 lemon
1 tablespoon tomato paste or 2 ripe tomatoes
seasoning
pie crust, see Card 5

1. Halve eggs, peel and chop onion and apple.
2. Melt fat, fry onion until pale gold.
3. Stir in flour and curry powder and cook until it bubbles, add water, stir till smooth.
4. Add remaining ingredients, except eggs.
5. Cover, simmer for 30 minutes, allow to cool.
6. Make pie crust, line pie plate with half.
7. Place eggs, cut side down, on dough.
8. Spread cold curry sauce over and between eggs.
9. Cover pie with remainder of dough, press edges together to seal, press up with back of knife, press into flutes.
10. Brush top with beaten egg or milk, decorate with leaves of dough.
11. Bake in 425° oven for 25-30 minutes.

Wait, “seasoning”? Can we be any more vague, Marguerite? I’ll just assume that’s shorthand for “salt and pepper to taste.”

Whatever. Here’s the key trio from the filling ingredients: hard-boiled eggs, apples, and onions. It looks like… I don’t know what it looks like, to be honest. I’ve never thought of these as going together. Maybe onions in a nice egg salad, sure, but the apples are throwing me off.

After the onions sizzled for a while, I added all the flour and curry called for… and it immediately sucked up all the melted fat, looking more like streusel than curry roux.

But everything smoothed back out after I added the water, and then it was straightforward to add everything else and let it stew for a bit while I made something to hold this weird, goopy filling.

So I tried to make Marguerite’s pie crust. It was dry, crumbly, not large enough for a two-crust pie, and really didn’t look like it was going to work at all.

I didn’t want this to fail because of a crummy (crumby? haha) crust, so I whipped up my favorite stir-n-roll instead. (Phew.)

Unfortunately, after taking some time to make a reasonable pie crust, I had to put a bunch of eggs and curry sauce on the top. It was sad. Pie crust should be filled with delightful things like berries, custard, chicken — eggs and goop, though?

At least it’s a two-crust pie, so I could cover up and ignore the contents until tasting time.

I decorated with apples of dough, rather than leaves. It gives some sort of warning as to the contents.

Also that’s the cookie cutter I found first.

And then it was time to bake, cut, and eat… and criticize.

Overall, this was not too bad. Ideally, the hardboiled eggs should have been in smaller slices or chunks. Trying to deal with hot egg halves, while coping with the odd flavor experience, made it much harder to eat. But when the taste was calmly, rationally considered, it wasn’t too bad.

One thing that both Buzz and I noted (while forcing ourselves to finish) was that it for some reason it felt very British — the whole meal-in-a-pie thing. This was possibly influenced by the fact that we’ve been binge-watching Downton Abbey Season 4, so everything feels a bit British. The Old Foodie posted a number of Curried Eggs recipe from the turn of the century — none of which were in pie crusts, but it means a Curried Egg Pie isn’t quite so bizarre as you might think. Or at least, it wasn’t bizarre sixty years ago!

Pieathalon has been a blast. If you’ve enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it, go take a look at some of my colleagues blogs and see what their experiences were like! (And stayed tuned for a bonus pie post here, later on today. Can’t let the pie fun end!)