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Salt and Cayenne (Fried cro tons of Bread)
Fried croûtons of Bread.
Two ounces of grated Parmesan.
Cut the whites of the eggs into strips, and rub the yolks through a wire sieve. Reduce the vinegar in a stewpan; add the sauce, then the raw yolk of egg, and cook. Season, add the shredded whites, and half the cheese to the sauce, and warm them up. Turn out on to a dish; sprinkle the yolk of egg and the rest of the cheese on the top and garnish with the fried croûtons.
Œufs à la Bonne Femme.
Ingredients.
Four Eggs, hard-boiled.
One ounce of Butter.
One teaspoonful of chopped Tarragon.
Beetroot cut into fancy shapes.
This page has been jumbled in the printing: the method belongs to one savoury, while the ingredient list that follows heads the next (Œufs à la Bonne Femme). Read it as an egg-and-cheese savoury and expect to supply some quantities yourself.
- The missing ingredientsThe method calls for vinegar, "the sauce" and a raw egg yolk, none of which appear in the fragment above. "The sauce" at this point is most likely a reduced béchamel or plain cream sauce, and the vinegar a small quantity reduced almost to a glaze; the quantities are not recoverable from the page and must be judged by eye.
- The hinge: the raw yolkOnce the raw yolk goes into the sauce it must not boil. Cook it over low heat, stirring, only until the sauce coats the spoon; a moment of hard heat and you have scrambled egg suspended in cream.
- Reducing the vinegarBoil the vinegar down in the pan until barely a film remains before the sauce goes in. It carries much of the sharpness of the dish, alongside the salt and cayenne, and unreduced vinegar risks curdling a cream sauce and tasting raw.
- Whites and yolks handled separatelyHard-boil the eggs, cool them completely, then shred the whites into fine strips and press the yolks through a fine sieve. The sieved yolk is a garnish only and goes on at the last moment, or it dissolves into the sauce and the contrast is lost.
- ParmesanTwo ounces, roughly half a cup coarsely grated and considerably more if rasped fine. Half is stirred into the warm sauce off the boil, half strewn on top; the recipe asks only that the mixture be warmed up, not browned.
- CroûtonsCut crustless bread into small triangles or half-inch dice and fry in clarified butter until golden and dry through. Fry them last, drain on paper, and set them round the dish at the table — they soften within minutes against a wet sauce.
- Tarragon and beetrootThese belong to the Œufs à la Bonne Femme heading that follows, not to the savoury above. Chopped tarragon and stamped-out shapes of cooked beetroot appear as a garnish for hard-boiled eggs in books of this kind.
- Yield and serviceFour eggs make a savoury for a small number — the little hot course after the sweet — or a light supper dish. Serve it very hot on a warmed dish, as the cheese sauce stiffens quickly.
The savoury was the last hot course of a formal late-Victorian and Edwardian dinner, served after the sweet and before dessert: something small, sharp and salty to close the meal, and the reason a book of this kind carries a whole section of cheese, anchovy and egg trifles built on fried bread. The pattern here — hard-boiled eggs, a cream sauce sharpened with reduced vinegar, Parmesan and croûtons — is a thrifty French domestic idea dressed for an English dining room. The name attached to the fragment that follows, à la bonne femme, means simply "in the good wife's manner" and was applied loosely in French cookery to plain, homely treatments; in practice it signalled little more than that the dish was uncomplicated. Pressing hard yolk through a wire sieve to scatter over a finished dish is the same trick later called a mimosa garnish, and it survives in egg mayonnaise and salade mimosa today.