Home › The Principles of Cookery › EGGS AND PARMESAN (a la Lorraine)
EGGS AND PARMESAN (a la Lorraine)
Break into a basin four fresh eggs, season with salt and cayenne, add a pint of cream, one ounce of grated Parmesan cheese, and the same of Gruyere. Mix all thoroughly together. Fill twelve small fireproof dishes with the mixture, and set them to poach for twenty minutes in a tightly covered flat saucepan, taking care that the water does not boil. When done sprinkle a little grated Parmesan on the surface of each, and colour with the salamander, or a red-hot iron. Probable cost, 8d.
A savoury baked custard, very loose by modern standards, cooked gently in a covered bain-marie and glazed at the last moment. Everything depends on the water never reaching a boil.
- The hinge: keep the water below a simmerEgg and cream set at around 170-180F; boiling water drives the custards past that and curdles them into weeping curds. Hold the pan water at a bare tremble, no bubbles breaking the surface, and cover it so the tops set without a skin.
- A pint here is an imperial pintCassell's is a British book, so the pint is 20 fl oz, about 570 ml. Four eggs to that much cream gives a deliberately soft, spoonable custard rather than anything sliceable.
- Twelve dishes is optimisticTwelve dishes means very small ones -- The mixture comes to roughly 800 ml, which works out at under 70 ml per dish across twelve. That is workable if the dishes are genuinely tiny; six to eight ramekins of 100-120 ml, filled about three-quarters, is a more convenient division for a modern table, though the deeper the dish the longer it will need.
- Timing depends on the dishTwenty minutes suits shallow ramekins standing in water that comes halfway up. Deeper pots need longer; test by tilting one, and pull them when the centre still wobbles as a unit. They firm up as they cool.
- The salamander is your broilerA salamander was an iron plate heated red in the fire and held over food to brown it. Use the grill or broiler at full heat for a minute or two, watching constantly, or a kitchen blowtorch on the Parmesan.
- The cheesesParmesan and Gruyere are both still exactly what the recipe means, but buy them in the piece and grate them. Pre-grated Parmesan is drier and often cut with anti-caking starch, which makes the custard grainy.
- SeasoningAn ounce each of hard cheese carries a fair amount of salt; season the eggs lightly and taste the raw mixture before filling. Cayenne is meant as a background warmth, so a couple of pinches for the whole batch.
- ServingServe them hot in their dishes as a first course or a light supper with bread, six to eight portions. They do not reheat well; the second heating splits the custard.
Some Victorian and Edwardian dishes labelled a la Lorraine pair cream with Gruyere-type cheese from the eastern French border country, a combination also found in cheese-bearing versions of quiche lorraine; the label was not applied consistently, and in classic French usage 'a la lorraine' often denoted quite different garnishes. The entry is in effect a lesson in gentle egg cookery: the crucial instruction is that the water must not boil, a rule that governs every custard, sweet or savoury. The reference to a salamander, and the alternative of a red-hot iron, points to kitchens where browning was still done with radiant heat from above rather than a gas grill. The "probable cost, 8d." was a standard Cassell's feature, meant to let a household cook price a dish against the week's budget; eightpence for a dozen portions marks this as a genteel but not extravagant course.