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Eggs and Sauce
Chop finely a tea-spoonful each of parsley and chives, and put them into a stewpan, with two ounces of butter and a little flour; add a glass of sherry, a tea-spoonful of salt, and half the quantity of pepper. When the sauce has simmered about ten minutes, have ready half a dozen poached eggs; lay them on toast, and send to table with the sauce poured round. Sufficient sauce for six eggs. Probable cost, 1s., without wine.
A quick herb-and-sherry butter sauce spooned round poached eggs on toast. The written proportions are terse in the Victorian manner, and two of them need adjusting before the sauce will behave.
- The hinge: the sauce has almost no liquidTwo ounces of butter, a little flour and one glass of sherry will not make a pourable sauce, and ten minutes of simmering will drive off most of the wine. Treat the flour and butter as a small roux and loosen it with about half a cup of light stock, milk or water alongside the sherry, then let the alcohol cook off.
- A glass of wineIn Victorian cookery books a wine glass is usually taken as about 2 fl oz, a quarter cup, though the measure was not standardised. Use a dry or medium sherry (fino or amontillado), not a sweet cream sherry.
- Two ounces of butter, a little flourTwo ounces is half a stick, 4 tablespoons. "A little flour" here means enough to bind, about 1 tablespoon; more makes it pasty at this scale.
- The salt is too muchA teaspoon of salt in a sauce for six eggs reflects a period palate. Start with a quarter teaspoon and correct at the end, especially if you have added stock.
- Chives and parsleyBoth should go in at the end rather than simmering ten minutes, or the colour and the onion note of the chives will be gone. Simmer the roux and liquid, then stir the herbs through off the heat.
- PoachingBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and running yolk. Poach them while the sauce simmers and drain them well on a cloth so the toast does not go to pieces.
- YieldSix eggs on toast: a light supper for three, or a first course for six.
- "Probable cost, 1s."One shilling, the running cost estimate Cassell's gives for almost every dish. It is a guide to relative expense in the 1870s-80s, not a figure that converts usefully today.
Eggs poached and sent up on toast under a sauce were a fixture of the Victorian breakfast, luncheon and supper table, where they filled the gap between a plain boiled egg and a made dish. Cassell's Dictionary of Cookery, issued in parts from the 1870s, was aimed at middle-class households, and its entries commonly carry a probable cost and a statement of how many they serve. The sherry marks this as the dressed-up version, and the wine is priced out separately, so the cook could see exactly what the flourish added.