Eggs: McIlhenny
Fry eggs in butter in a spider, lift them and keep hot over boiling water. If there is not enough gravy in the pan, put in a little more butter, 1 tablespoonful vinegar, a dash of onion juice, salt, pepper, and a few drops of McIlhenny's Tabasco.
Thicken slightly with flour, beat till creamy, and strain the brown gravy over eggs.
Baked Soufflé of Eggs. 6 eggs, 1 cupful milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, Pepper and salt.
Scald the milk in a double boiler, add to it the yolks of eggs, beaten till thick, also the butter and seasonings. When the mixture begins to thicken like a custard, stir in the whites of eggs, beaten to a stiff EGGS froth. Pour into a deep buttered baking dish and bake in a moderate oven till puffy and brown. Serve immediately.
Scrambled Eggs. 4 eggs, teaspoonful salt, Dash pepper, 3 tablespoonfuls milk.
Whip the eggs just enough to break them up; they do not need to be light or frothy. Put the butter into an omelet pan, and when it is brown pour in the egg. Scrape the cooked eggs from the bottom of the pan, tipping it so the uncooked egg will run down on the hot iron. Double it over before it begins to get brown, and serve very hot.
Deviled Eggs. 5 hard-boiled eggs, cupful white sauce, Salt and pepper, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce, 2 tablespoonfuls grated cheese.
Chop the eggs coarsely, sprinkle the cheese through them, and toss the mixture together with a fork.
Add the seasonings, then stir in the sauce. Put in a saucepan, simmer gently for a few minutes, and serve on slices of buttered toast.
Eggs Farci (French recipe). 6 hard-boiled eggs, teaspoonful onion juice, Pepper and salt, 4 tablespoonfuls stale bread crumbs, 2 tablespoonfuls chopped parsley, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Shell the eggs, cut them in halves lengthwise, remove the yolks and mash them. Add the bread crumbs, soften with a little milk, the seasonings, and parsley. Mash the yolk and bread mixture together till pasty, fill it into the whites of the eggs, and with what is left make a small mound in a baking dish; set the stuffed eggs on top, pour a white sauce over them, and set in the oven till piping hot.
Curry of Eggs. 6 hard-boiled eggs, 1 tablespoonful flour, 1 tablespoonful butter, 1 tablespoonful curry powder, teaspoonful onion juice, Pepper and salt, 1 cupful veal or chicken stock.
Melt the butter in a saucepan, blend with the flour, put in the stock and seasoning, and beat the sauce till creamy. Lay on eggs cut in slices, cook to the boiling point, and serve hot on buttered toast.
Eggs Lucanian (Italian recipe). 5 eggs, 1 cupful macaroni, cupful grated cheese, 1½ cupfuls white sauce.
Boil the eggs hard, cutting in eighths, lengthwise, then add the macaroni, cheese, and sauce; season with salt, paprika, onion juice, and anchovy essence. Turn into a buttered baking dish, cover with buttered crumbs, and set in the oven long enough to brown the crumbs.
Eggs à la Cuba (Spanish recipe). 4 tablespoonfuls sausage meat, 1 teaspoonful minced onion, 8 eggs.
Cook the sausage meat and minced onion for five minutes over a hot fire. Beat the eggs until light and add to the meat and onion; season with salt and pepper; stir until the eggs become thick. Serve on slices of hot, buttered toast.
Egg Croquettes. 6 eggs, can mushrooms, 2 cupfuls milk, 1 tablespoonful butter, 2 tablespoonfuls flour.
MRS. CURTIS'S COOKBOOK Boil the eggs hard; chop the whites and add the mushrooms (which should be drained from liquor). Mash the yolks of the eggs through a press.
Scald the milk; rub together until smooth the flour and butter; add to the milk and stir until it thickens; add the yolk of one raw egg, the whites and yolks of the boiled eggs, mushrooms, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir quickly, take from the fire, and put away to cool. When thoroughly cold, form into quettes; dip in egg and bread crumbs and fry in smoking hot fat. Garnish with parsley, and serve. cro- Omelet Rudolph (German recipe). 2 tablespoonfuls butter, 1 raw onion, 1 tablespoonful salt pork, 1 tablespoonful roast beef, 2 mushrooms, 1 tablespoonful tomato sauce, 1 tablespoonful grated bread crumbs, Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce.
Into a saucepan put the butter and raw onion chopped very fine; add the salt pork, which has been slightly cooked, the beef, mushrooms, a pinch of salt, chopped parsley and tabasco, then stir in the tomato sauce and bread crumbs. Make a plain omelet; when cooked, spread with the above mixture and turn over carefully.
What is printed here as a single entry is really a run of a dozen egg dishes, opening with fried eggs in a Tabasco pan gravy. The techniques are sound; the measurements need translating and several quantities have to be judged by eye.
- A spiderAn iron frying pan, originally one with legs to stand over coals. A cast-iron skillet is the direct equivalent and behaves the same way for the brown butter gravy.
- The pan gravy is the pointFry the eggs in enough butter to leave a browned film in the pan, then deglaze with the vinegar off direct heat. The tablespoon of vinegar with onion juice and Tabasco is essentially a quick beurre noir; strain it so no flour lumps or browned specks land on the eggs.
- Onion juiceGrate an onion on a fine rasp and press the pulp through a sieve, or squeeze a wedge in a garlic press. A quarter of a small onion gives roughly a teaspoon.
- Anchovy essenceA thin, salty bottled fish preparation common in kitchens of the period. A teaspoon of anchovy paste or a splash of colatura or fish sauce fills the same role in the Eggs Lucanian.
- Missing fractionsSeveral ingredient lines have lost their fractions in printing: "teaspoonful salt" in the scrambled eggs, "cupful white sauce" in the deviled eggs, "cupful grated cheese" in the Eggs Lucanian, and "can mushrooms" in the croquettes. Half the stated measure is the usual reading for the spoon and cup lines, but the exact quantities have to be judged by eye; the same applies to the mushrooms, where the size of can is not recoverable.
- Butter in the scrambled eggsThe method calls for butter that never appears in the ingredient list; use about a tablespoon. Note also that the method described — scraping and folding, then doubling it over — produces a folded omelet rather than scrambled eggs. Brown butter cooks the eggs fast, so work off the heat if you want them soft.
- Oven temperaturesA moderate oven is usually reckoned at 350-375F; the baked souffle will take roughly half an hour at that heat and, being custard-based, will sink soon after it leaves the oven, which is why the original says serve immediately. The other baked dishes -- Eggs Farci, Eggs Lucanian, the croquette crumbs -- are given no oven term in the text; they only need to heat through and brown, for which a hotter oven, around 400F, is the modern equivalent.
- CroquettesThe panade must be chilled until firm, several hours or overnight, or the croquettes will burst. Fry at 365-375F; "smoking hot fat" is the period's rough-and-ready description, judged by eye or by a bread cube rather than by thermometer.
- YieldsPortions follow the egg count: the six-egg dishes make three or four light servings, the four-egg scramble two, the eight-egg Eggs a la Cuba four. Several of them -- the deviled eggs, the curry, the Eggs a la Cuba -- are directed onto buttered toast; the rest are served hot from the dish or pan.
The recurring "Dash McIlhenny's Tabasco Sauce" in these entries is worth noticing: the sauce, made on Avery Island in Louisiana from the 1860s, was well established as a household seasoning by the turn of the century, and the repeated use of the brand name rather than a generic "pepper sauce" was a common practice in cookbooks of the period. Hence, too, the international labels attached here -- French, Italian, Spanish, German -- which describe not authentic regional dishes so much as an American kitchen dressing up hard-boiled eggs with curry powder, macaroni, sausage or tomato sauce and giving each version a passport.