Boil ½ cup of vinegar with one cup of water and break in fresh eggs one at a time and poach them. Remove to a platter; sprinkle with salt and pepper. Then add 1 tablespoonful of butter and 1 tablespoonful of sugar to the sauce; let boil up and pour over the eggs. Serve on buttered toast.
A poached-egg dish whose poaching liquid becomes the sauce — the whole point is that nothing is thrown away. The proportions are strong, and the timing of the eggs is the hinge.
- The acid is very highHalf a cup of vinegar to one cup of water is roughly a 1:2 ratio, far more than the splash usually added to poaching water. It sets the whites fast and tight but leaves them noticeably sour, which the butter and sugar are there to correct. A mild cider or white wine vinegar behaves better here than a sharp distilled one.
- Poach below the boilThe recipe says boil, but eggs dropped into a rolling liquid shred. Bring it to a boil, drop the heat until the surface only shivers, then slide the eggs in one at a time as directed.
- TimingThree minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk; four minutes firms the yolk at the edge. In this acidic liquid the whites tighten a little faster than in plain water, so check at two and a half minutes.
- Reducing the sauceA cup and a half of liquid poured over four eggs will flood the toast. After the eggs come out, boil the liquid down by half or more before adding the butter and sugar — you want a few spoonfuls of glaze, not a broth.
- Butter and sugarOne tablespoon of each into the reduced liquid makes a rough sweet-sour sauce. It will not emulsify smoothly unless you take it off the heat and whisk the butter in cold, in pieces, which is worth doing.
- Seasoning orderSalt and pepper go on the eggs before the sauce, as written; the sauce itself needs no further salt until you have tasted the reduction, which concentrates fast.
- YieldNo quantity of eggs is given. The liquid comfortably poaches four, which serves two on buttered toast as a light supper or breakfast.
This dish belongs to a genre of early twentieth-century American calendar cookbooks that assigned one dish to each day of the year and tagged each with a nationality, often loosely — the label told the reader the dish was foreign more than it told them anything about Poland. Sweet-sour pairings of vinegar and sugar finished with butter do appear in Polish cooking, in dishes such as carp in grey sauce and dressed beets, though the specific application to poached eggs is not well documented. Eggs poached in an acidulated liquid and served on bread also fit the period's fondness for the chafing-dish supper: quick, hot, made in one pan, and cheap enough to serve on a weeknight.