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Fluffed Eggs
Beat the white until stiff; add a few grains of salt; place in a buttered ramekin dish or saucer; put a piece of butter in center of white, and place unbroken yolk on top. Set the egg dish in pan of boiling water; cover and cook three minutes. Serve immediately.
Poached Eggs à la Française Fill a saucepan three fourths full of boiling water; add salt and vinegar, stir the boiling water vigorously with a spoon. Break egg in cup and drop deftly into eddy formed by swift stirring of water. When white is firm, remove with buttered skimmer, trim, and serve.
Two egg dishes have been run together here by the typesetter: a baked-and-steamed "fluffed" egg and a classic French poached egg. Both are quick, and both depend on temperature control more than technique.
- The hinge: keep the yolk wholeThe whole point of the fluffed egg is separating the egg and returning the intact yolk to a nest of beaten white. Separate cold eggs, since the yolk membrane is firmer, then let the white come to room temperature before beating so it whips to full volume.
- "A few grains of salt"A pinch, no more. Salt added before beating slows the foam; add it once the white already holds soft peaks.
- Ramekin or saucerAny shallow ovenproof dish of about 4-6 oz will do. Butter it well, as the cooked white sticks readily.
- The cooking methodThis is a steam bath, not a bain-marie in the oven. The dish sits in a pan of boiling water, covered, so the trapped steam sets the surface. Water should come no more than halfway up the dish or the white will float and tip.
- Three minutes means a liquid yolkAt three minutes the white is just set and the yolk is entirely runny. Five to six minutes gives a thickened, jammy yolk. Anyone who should avoid undercooked eggs should skip this dish rather than lengthen it, since long steaming turns the beaten white weeping and rubbery.
- Poaching waterFor the second recipe, use about a tablespoon of white vinegar per quart of water and a good pinch of salt. Bring it to the boil to start the vortex, then drop the heat so the water only shivers; a rolling boil shreds the white no matter how deftly the egg goes in.
- "Buttered skimmer"A slotted spoon rubbed with butter so the egg releases cleanly. A slotted spoon dipped in the hot water works as well. Trimming means shearing off the ragged skirt of white with a knife or the spoon's edge.
- YieldOne egg per dish, one or two per person. Both are made to order and collapse or toughen on standing, so cook them last.
Lowney's Cook Book was written by Maria Willett Howard and published in 1907 by the Walter M. Lowney Company, the Boston chocolate manufacturer, in the same tradition of branded cookbooks that gave us the Rumford and Royal Baking Powder collections. That such books carried full chapters on eggs and vegetables, well beyond anything involving cocoa, shows how these volumes were pitched: a complete household manual with the sponsor's product woven through the sweets. The fluffed egg belongs to a small family of turn-of-the-century dishes that treated the separated egg as a bit of theatre, the beaten white forming a snowy nest for the intact yolk. Its neighbour here, the vortex-poached egg labelled a la Francaise, was repeated in American cookbooks for decades.