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Croûtons of Bread (Anchovy or Bloater Paste)
Anchovy or Bloater Paste.
Butter. Take some small fireproof china soufflé or fondu cases, butter them well inside with fresh butter, and sprinkle them with very finely chopped parsley.
Break an egg carefully into each cup, stand them up to the middle of the cups in boiling water and cook for ten minutes till quite hard. Cut some rounds of bread the size of the cups, fry these a nice brown in boiling fat, spread these croûtons with anchovy or bloater paste, worked up with some butter. Turn the eggs out on to the croûtons, serve very hot.
Œufs à la Suisse.
Ingredients.
Two ounces of fresh Butter.
A late-Victorian savoury: eggs baked in buttered china cups in a water bath, turned out onto fried bread spread with anchovy or bloater paste. The whole thing lives or dies on the seasoning balance between the salt paste and the plain egg.
- The stray last line"Œufs à la Suisse. Ingredients. Two ounces of fresh Butter" is the opening of the next recipe in the book, caught by the page break. It is not part of this dish.
- Bloater pasteA bloater is a whole herring, salted and cold-smoked ungutted, so the paste tastes gamier than anchovy. Both pastes are still sold in jars; anchovy paste in a tube, or a potted anchovy relish such as Gentleman's Relish, does the same job. Both are very salty, so the eggs need no added salt.
- Soufflé or fondu casesThese are small individual fireproof china cups, roughly 2 to 3 fl oz each. Modern ramekins are the direct equivalent; choose ones with straight sides so the egg unmoulds cleanly.
- Butter and parsley liningButter the cups thoroughly right to the rim and press the chopped parsley onto the butter. This is what lets the egg turn out whole, and the parsley ends up as a green casing on the finished egg. Skimp on the butter and the egg tears.
- Ten minutes "quite hard"Standing the cups halfway up in boiling water is a stovetop bain-marie; the recipe calls for boiling water, though a steady simmer is easier to control. Ten minutes should give a fully set yolk in a small cup; less time leaves the yolk softer, but the eggs are then harder to unmould intact.
- Frying the croûtons"Boiling fat" means fat hot enough to bubble around the bread, i.e. ordinary deep-frying heat. Fry the rounds until golden, drain on paper, and spread the paste while they are still warm so the butter in it softens. The recipe has them cut the size of the cups.
- Working up the pasteBeat the paste with soft butter to taste; the recipe gives no proportion. Undiluted anchovy or bloater paste straight from the jar will overwhelm the egg.
- Yield and timingOne egg per person as a savoury, two as a light lunch dish. Fry the croûtons while the eggs cook and assemble at the last moment; the bread goes soft under a standing egg within a few minutes.
Savouries were the small, salty course served after the sweet at Victorian and Edwardian dinners, largely an English habit. Both pastes here belong to the nineteenth-century trade in potted fish: anchovy paste and its relatives, of which Gentleman's Relish is the best-known survivor, and bloater paste made from cured herring, which were sold in glass or stoneware pots as a breakfast and teatime spread. Croûton is simply French for a piece of crust, and in period cookery it means a shaped, fried support for something else rather than the small cubes scattered on soup today. The technique of baking eggs in buttered china cups set in water is the same one behind œufs en cocotte, and the parsley lining is a small piece of showmanship typical of a period that liked food to arrive in a mould's shape.