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Eggs, Poached, with Cream
Put half a gill of cream into a small saucepan, and season it with salt, pepper, and pounded sugar to taste. Let it warm gradually, and when ready to boil, remove it from the fire and stir in an ounce of butter; keep moving the saucepan round until the butter is dissolved. Have ready four or five fresh eggs poached; lay them on a dish, pour the sauce quickly over, and serve. Time, three to four minutes to poach the eggs. Probable cost, 9d. Allow two eggs for each person.
A three-ingredient sauce that lives or dies by temperature control. Everything hinges on adding the butter off the heat.
- Half a gillAn imperial gill is 5 fl oz, so half a gill is 2 1/2 fl oz — a scant third of a cup. (An American gill is 4 fl oz; if you are working from a US measure, use 1/4 cup.) That is a small amount of sauce, deliberately so: it should coat the eggs, not pool around them.
- Pounded sugarCaster or superfine sugar, pounded fine in a mortar from loaf sugar. The recipe says 'to taste', and a pinch is probably all that is wanted — it rounds the cream rather than sweetening it.
- Off the heat for the butterThe instruction to remove the pan before stirring in the butter is the point of the method: held over the flame the sauce is liable to separate into an oily film rather than stay glossy. Swirl the pan, do not whisk hard, and do not return it to the heat.
- Cream to useDouble or heavy cream. Single cream or half-and-half has too little fat to hold the butter and will thin out as soon as it meets the hot egg.
- Poaching timeThree to four minutes is right for a set white and a liquid yolk in barely simmering water. Fresh eggs, as specified, matter — older whites spread instead of gathering around the yolk.
- Timing the two elementsThe sauce is quickly made and cannot wait; the recipe has the eggs poached and ready, so lift them onto a warm dish, then pour the sauce straight over. 'Pour the sauce quickly' means before it cools.
- YieldTwo eggs per person, so four or five eggs feeds two, with the fifth as the cook's margin.
- Probable costNinepence in pre-decimal currency — the book quoted prices as a guide to household budgeting.
Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery was a vast alphabetical reference, and its egg section runs to dozens of near-identical entries — poached with cream, with gravy, with anchovy, with spinach — each a small variation on a technique the reader was assumed already to know. The approach reflects the influence of French practice on English middle-class cooking: a plain poached egg raised by a butter-enriched cream sauce. The pinch of sugar alongside the salt and pepper turns up elsewhere in savoury cream sauces of the period and is now largely abandoned. The costing in pence was one of the book's selling points: it let a housekeeper judge a dish against the week's allowance before she committed to it.