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Eggs, on Crumpets
Cut three crumpets in halves, toast and butter them, lay a piece of thinly sliced boiled ham on each half crumpet. Keep them hot whilst six eggs are being poached, put an egg on each piece, and serve at once.
A breakfast dish of three ingredients, which means the poaching is the whole of it. Everything else is assembly and timing.
- YieldSix halves, six eggs: two or three servings as a breakfast or supper dish, one if it is the whole meal. Scale by the crumpet.
- CrumpetsEnglish crumpets, the holed, griddled yeast batter cakes (in some regions barely distinguished from pikelets). The recipe does not say which way to cut them; whichever way you halve them, toast the cut face hard so it does not go soggy, and butter while hot so it runs into the holes.
- The ham"Boiled ham" here means cooked gammon carved thin, not a cured raw ham. Any good thin-sliced cooked ham works; cut it to the size of the crumpet half so nothing overhangs and cools.
- PoachingBarely trembling water, a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and a liquid yolk. Fresher eggs hold their shape far better; older whites spread into rags.
- Keeping things hotThe recipe says only to keep them hot; a very low oven and a warm plate will do while the eggs go in. Do not hold poached eggs — they toughen. If you must, slide them into a bowl of warm (not hot) water for a minute or two.
- Drain the eggsLift each egg with a slotted spoon and rest it on a folded cloth or kitchen paper for a moment. Poaching water carried onto a toasted crumpet undoes the toasting immediately.
- SeasoningThe original assumes it. Salt and pepper the eggs after they leave the water, not before, and go lightly on salt given the ham.
Crumpets belong to the British tea and breakfast table, a griddled yeast-and-batter cake whose open holes — a by-product of the wet batter and its raising agent — take melted butter well, and, as here, whatever is laid on top. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a late-Victorian household reference organised alphabetically, and its egg section runs to dozens of near-identical variations: eggs on toast, on spinach, on anchovy, on crumpets. Dishes of this sort are the kind that could be assembled quickly from bought bread goods and the remains of a boiled ham. The same combination of starch base, cured meat and poached egg appears in eggs Benedict, which emerges in late-nineteenth-century New York, roughly contemporaneous with Cassell's; no line of descent between them is established, and the crumpet version never acquired a sauce.