Eggs Brouilli
Beat well 4 eggs. Add to them 1 teaspoonful of beef extract dissolved in 3 tablespoonfuls of hot water, 4 tablespoonfuls of cream, a pinch of salt, a dash of pepper. Stand in a pan of hot water and stir over the fire until thick and creamy. Serve at once on toast squares.
A soft scrambled egg cooked in a water bath, enriched with beef extract. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat and constant motion.
- The nameBrouillé is French for scrambled; the book's "brouilli" is a variant spelling. Nothing exotic is intended.
- Beef extractThe concentrated meat pastes sold as Bovril, Liebig's or Armour's Extract of Beef. A teaspoon of any current beef extract or a strong bouillon paste works; it is salty, so hold back on the added salt until you taste.
- "Stand in a pan of hot water"This is a bain-marie: the vessel sits in a pan of water held just below a simmer, so the eggs never see direct heat, which is why they come out creamy rather than curded.
- Stir constantlyThe instruction "stir over the fire until thick and creamy" is the whole technique. Keep a spatula or wooden spoon moving through the mixture the entire time or you get lumps at the edges. It will take considerably longer than pan scrambling.
- Pull them earlyTake the bowl off the heat while the eggs still look slightly looser than you want. Residual heat carries them further, and "serve at once" is not politeness but necessity: they tighten and weep if held.
- Liquid ratioThree tablespoons water plus four of cream to four eggs is a wet mixture by modern standards. That is deliberate for this style, but it is another reason the water bath matters, since a hot pan would drive the liquid out.
- YieldFour eggs serves two as a light supper or breakfast, on two or three squares of toast each. Cut and toast the bread while the eggs cook.
Meat extract turns up constantly in cheap cookery of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Justus von Liebig's method of boiling beef down to a dark concentrate was commercialised in the 1860s, and by the time this book was written such extracts were a pantry staple in Britain and America, sold as an economical way to give savour to invalid food, soups and egg dishes without buying meat. That is the logic of a book of low-cost recipes: four eggs and a spoonful of extract stand in for a meat course. The water-bath scramble itself belongs to the French kitchen tradition.