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Eggs and Omelettes
THESE are specially useful for luncheon, and for dinner when maigre dishes are required. Some of them are suitable for savouries. At luncheon they are usually served first, as at a foreign déjeûner, but they are sometimes introduced as second-course dishes. This does not, of course, apply to the sweet omelettes.
Poached eggs, or Œufs pochés, may be served au jus, with brown gravy, garnished with fillets of anchovy placed crosswise on each egg; or au jambon, on oval slices of fried ham, with Poivrade sauce.
So-called "buttered" eggs-cooked with butter, etc. are served as Œufs brouillés.
Œufs brouillés aux pointes d'asperges, aux champignons, aux truffes, or au jambon, are dressed in the same way, with the addition of asparagus cut up, chopped mushrooms, truffles, or ham. brouillés à l'Indienne are cooked with butter, chopped onion, curry powder, etc.
Œufs au beurre noir-fried, and served in black. butter sauce. à la Suisse are baked in a dish lined with slices of cheese, covered with cream and sprinkled with grated cheese. au kari, or à l'Indienne, are poached in a sauce of milk, butter, onions, curry powder, etc. au miroir are baked with butter, etc., in the dish in which they are served. aux pistaches-mixed with cream, pounded pistachio nuts, etc., and baked. à la bonne femme-baked with chopped onions and vinegar. au soleil poached, dipped in batter and fried.
These are sometimes called en fritot. à la matelote poached, and served on croûtons, garnished with strips of anchovies and gherkins, with fine herbs sauce. à la Portugaise-poached, and served on croûtons, covered with half tomatoes filled with savoury stuffing. à la neige-spoonfuls of whipped whites poached in milk, etc.; served in the milk with yolks of eggs. en caisse-cooked in little soufflé cases half filled with breadcrumbs. au bouillon-steamed with stock in little moulds; served with gravy. à la Provençale-cooked in small moulds with brown sauce, chopped onions, etc., and served with brown sauce. à la Florentine are lightly boiled, shelled, and served on a purée of fowl, garnished with fried pastry straws.
The opening lines are the most useful thing on the page: eggs belong to luncheon, and to dinner on days when no meat may be served. Everything after that is a list of ways to dress them.
- MaigreA maigre dish is a meatless one, for Fridays and for Lent. It is why a book about ordering dinner needs a chapter on eggs this long, and why the list runs so far past what anyone would otherwise want to do with six of them.
- Œufs brouillés and buttered eggsThe same dish under two names. The method is slow, over gentle heat, with the butter worked in off the fire, so the result is loose and barely set rather than dry and in curds.
- Au miroirBaked in the dish they are served in, which a modern kitchen calls shirred eggs or eggs en cocotte. The dish has to be hot before the eggs go in, or the white sets unevenly around a cold middle.
- Au soleilA poached egg cooled, dried, battered and deep-fried. It works, but the yolk will be set through by the time the coating colours, so there is no point attempting it in hope of a soft one.
- A sweet in a savoury chapterÀ la neige — whipped whites poached in milk and served with the yolks — is the dish better known as floating islands. Its appearance here is a reminder that the chapter is organised by raw material, not by where a dish lands on the menu.
- Freshness decides the poachingA dozen of these depend on an egg that holds together in water, and a stale white spreads instead of gathering. A little vinegar helps a borderline egg and cannot rescue an old one.
Two separate calendars are visible in the first three sentences. One is religious: maigre days meant Fridays and Lent, and a house that entertained had to be able to put a dinner on the table without meat several dozen times a year, which is what this chapter is for. The other is social, and the page gives it away by comparing its own luncheon to a foreign déjéûner — eggs first, as they would be abroad, rather than buried mid-meal. The note that some of these are suitable as savouries points at a third habit, the small sharp dish served at the end of a British dinner after the sweet, a course that existed almost nowhere else and has now gone from Britain too.