Fried Eggs
Melt a tablespoon of butter in a frying-pan, but do not brown. Drop in the eggs and season with salt and pepper. Cover the pan and after the first minute, put the pan on the back of the stove or off the fire, and cook for three minutes.
If fried in bacon or ham fat use the same proportions. A tablespoon of fat is sufficient for six eggs. To take from the pan, slide a spatula under the eggs to loosen and slide from the pan.
A method for gently steam-basted fried eggs rather than crisp-edged ones. The whole technique rests on keeping the fat below browning temperature.
- The hinge: never let the butter colorBrowned butter means the pan is well above the temperature at which egg white sets tender. Melt the butter over medium-low, and if it foams and sizzles hard, pull the pan off and let it settle before the eggs go in.
- "The back of the stove"On a wood or coal range this was the cool zone, well below a searing heat. On a gas or electric hob, turn the burner to its lowest setting after the first minute, or slide the pan off the heat entirely as written.
- Why the lidCovering traps steam that sets the film of white over the yolk without flipping. Three minutes off direct heat should give a set white with the yolk still soft; longer cooking will firm the yolk.
- One tablespoon for six eggsThat is a bare film, and it assumes a well-seasoned iron or steel pan. In anything less slick, use a tablespoon for two or three eggs, or the whites will grip.
- Bacon or ham fatRendered fat from a modern cured bacon carries more salt, and often sugar from the cure. Season the eggs more lightly and watch that the fat does not scorch.
- Pan sizeSix eggs need a wide pan if they are to sit in a single layer without running together. Crowded eggs cook unevenly and cannot be lifted out whole.
- YieldSix eggs serves three at breakfast, or two if they are the meal.
This comes from Rufus Estes's Good Things to Eat (1911), one of the earliest cookbooks published by an African American chef. Estes was born enslaved in Tennessee, cooked in Chicago and later for Pullman's private railcars, and his book reads like a working professional's notebook: terse, precise about heat, and unsentimental. The instruction to move the pan to the back of the stove is a range cook's reflex, an era when heat was managed by geography rather than by a dial, and the method is close to the French oeufs sur le plat: fat kept below browning, the egg coaxed rather than seared.