Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs, Poached, with Madeira Sauce
Eggs, Poached, with Madeira Sauce
Poach the required number of eggs, trim them neatly, and lay them on slices of fried bacon. Garnish round with small forcemeat balls, and pour over them a quarter of a pint of Madeira sauce. (See MADEIRA SAUCE.)
A composed egg dish of the sort Victorian cooks turned out for breakfast or a light supper, written on the assumption that the sauce and forcemeat already exist in the kitchen. Everything hinges on the eggs being poached soft and dressed at the last minute.
- The hinge: soft yolks, served at oncePoach the eggs three minutes at most, in barely trembling water, so the yolk stays liquid and runs into the sauce. Once trimmed they should go straight onto the bacon and be sauced immediately; held eggs firm up and the whole point of the dish is lost.
- A quarter of a pintThis is an imperial quarter-pint, 5 fl oz, or a scant 2/3 US cup. That is a modest amount, meant to pool around the eggs rather than blanket them.
- Madeira sauceThe cross-reference will be to a brown sauce of the period, an espagnole or reduced stock-based sauce finished with Madeira; such sauces are generally not boiled hard after the wine goes in. A good dark chicken or veal stock reduced with a splash of Madeira and mounted with butter will stand in.
- Forcemeat ballsVictorian forcemeat of this kind is generally a bound mixture of chopped veal or poultry, suet or butter, breadcrumbs, herbs and egg, rolled small and fried or poached. Hazelnut-sized suits a poached egg; anything larger overwhelms it. Cook them through to 165F if they contain raw poultry, or 145F for pork.
- TrimmingTrimming means shearing off the ragged skirts of white with a knife or round cutter once the egg is lifted out and drained. A splash of vinegar in the poaching water and a quick swirl keep the whites compact and reduce how much you have to cut away.
- The baconPeriod bacon was typically dry-cured and often cut thicker and saltier than most supermarket streaky. Fry until firm but not brittle; a shattering crisp rasher makes the egg impossible to cut.
- YieldThe recipe sets no quantities beyond the sauce, leaving the cook to scale it. As a rough guide, the quarter-pint of sauce will dress a few eggs rather than a large dishful.
Poached eggs set on bacon or ham and finished with a brown wine sauce belong to the late-Victorian breakfast and supper repertoire, where the same handful of mother sauces was rotated across meat, fish and eggs alike. Madeira held a particular place in the English kitchen: fortified, stable in cask, and long a staple of the wine trade with the island, and it persisted in cookery sauces after its heyday as a drinking wine had passed. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, arranged alphabetically and heavy with cross-references, assumes a cook who already has stock, sauce and forcemeat at hand, which is why an entry like this runs to three lines: it is an assembly note within a much larger system rather than a standalone recipe. The dish also shows the period habit of garnishing eggs with forcemeat balls, a practice inherited from earlier eighteenth-century cookery that had faded from home cooking by the later twentieth century.