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Eggs a La Suisse
Melt one tablespoon of butter in the blazer, add one-half cup of cream, and when the cream reaches the boiling-point, carefully slip in four eggs. Place the blazer over the hot-water pan, and sprinkle with Larkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper. When the whites are nearly firm sprinkle with grated cheese. Finish cooking and serve on rounds of buttered toast. Pour remaining cream over them.
A chafing-dish supper dish: eggs poached in cream rather than water, finished with cheese. It is quick, and the only real risk is overheating the cream before the eggs go in.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame; the hot-water pan beneath it is the bain-marie. A small heavy skillet over low heat, then moved to a wide pan of barely simmering water, does the same job.
- Do not let the cream boil hardCream at a full rolling boil will break and turn grainy around the eggs. Bring it just to the first tremble, then slip the eggs in and move the pan off direct heat immediately.
- Half a cup of creamUse heavy or whipping cream. Period "cream" was not standardised and varied a good deal in richness, but the higher fat is more forgiving here and less likely to curdle.
- Larkin salt and pepperLarkin Table Salt and Larkin White Pepper were house-brand products sold by the company that issued this book. Ordinary fine salt and ground white pepper are exact substitutes; white pepper is worth keeping to, since black specks show badly against cream and egg white.
- The cheeseNo variety is named, but the dish's name points to Gruyere or Emmental. Grate it fine so it melts in the residual heat rather than needing more cooking, which would toughen the whites.
- Doneness"Whites nearly firm" means the yolks stay liquid. Timing over the water bath will vary with the pan and the heat of the water, so judge by the whites rather than the clock. The eggs continue setting on the way to the table, so pull them a shade underdone.
- YieldFour eggs serves two as a supper or lunch dish, one if it is the whole meal. Have the toast cut in rounds and buttered before the eggs go into the cream; there is no time once they are in.
Eggs a la Suisse -- "Swiss-fashion" -- is a name used in nineteenth-century cookery for eggs baked or set in cream with grated cheese, and versions appear in French and English cookbooks before this book, often in individual dishes in the oven. What is distinctive here is the equipment. The chafing dish had a long vogue in American middle-class homes from the 1890s into the 1910s, when it was the fashionable way to produce a hot dish at the table without a kitchen or a servant, and cookbooks of the period commonly carried a chafing-dish chapter of eggs, oysters, rarebits and creamed things. The named brands in the ingredient list place this in another period habit: cookbooks issued or sponsored by grocery and household-goods companies, given away or sold cheaply, in which the recipes double as advertising for the pantry staples the reader is expected to buy.