Poach fresh eggs one at a time; then put in a well-buttered baking-dish; sprinkle with salt, pepper, bits of butter and grated cheese. Pour over the top ½ cup of cream sauce and cover with fine bread-crumbs. Set in the oven to brown and serve hot with tomato-sauce.
October 14 — No. 14
Austrian
A short, workable dish once the gaps are filled: the original assumes you already know how to make a cream sauce and gives no quantities or oven setting.
- Underpoach the eggsThis is the hinge. The eggs poach once and then bake again, so pull them at about two minutes, while the white is just set and the yolk is fully liquid. Eggs poached to your usual standard will come out of the oven hard and grainy.
- Oven heat"Set in the oven to brown" gives no temperature. A hot oven, in the region of 425F, for a few minutes, or a minute or two under the broiler, will do the job. The goal is colour on the crumbs, not further cooking of the eggs.
- Cream sauceA period cream sauce is a thin bechamel finished with cream, or in some households simply cream reduced and thickened with a little butter and flour. Half a cup is enough to blanket four eggs; make it loose, since it will tighten in the oven.
- The cheeseUnspecified. A firm dry grating cheese suits it. Note that the recipe sprinkles the cheese on before the sauce goes over, not after.
- Breadcrumbs"Fine bread-crumbs" most likely means dried crumbs rather than fresh, though the book does not specify. Toss them with a little melted butter so they brown evenly rather than scorching at the edges of the dish.
- Dish and quantityA shallow gratin dish, or individual ramekins if you want the eggs to stay separate. The recipe fixes no number of eggs and no yield; the only quantity given is the half cup of sauce, so scale that with however many eggs you poach.
- Tomato sauceThe recipe says only to serve the dish with tomato sauce. Spooning it around rather than over keeps the crumb crust intact, and a plain unsweetened simmered sauce cuts the cream.
Eggs poached, sauced and browned under crumbs belong to the broad family of gratineed egg dishes found in central European and French cooking of the period, where a small number of eggs, a spoonful of sauce and a handful of cheese could be turned into a hot supper or luncheon course. The label "Austrian" in a book of this kind should be read loosely; national labels in compilations of this sort often sit lightly on the dish itself. What the entry does record accurately is the daily-calendar format the book is built on, one dish for each day of the year, which pushed the author into a compressed shorthand that assumed the reader already had a cream sauce and a tomato sauce in her working repertoire.