Home › Invalid Cookery › Poached Eggs (Log Cabin Eggs--Make a log)
Poached Eggs (Log Cabin Eggs--Make a log)
1. Log Cabin Eggs--Make a log cabin from narrow strips of toast. Cut up half a slice of toast to put in the bottom of the log cabin. Lay the poached egg on top of the broken-up toast, inside the log cabin. Make a tiny flag from paper, drawing in the colors, and paste it onto a toothpick, for a mast. Stick the other end of the toothpick into the side of the egg. 2. Serve a poached egg in a buttered spinach nest. 3. Place a poached egg on a round of toast, mask the egg with a thin white sauce, and garnish with chopped parsley. 4. Poached Eggs in Potatoes--Bake potato. Cut off the top of it, scoop out the center and season it with butter, salt and a bit of pepper, mashing it up. Refill the potato shell with the potato mixture, and place a poached egg on top. 5. Poached Eggs in Rice Nests--Place the rice when freshly boiled into small molds. Set away to harden. Turn out, scoop out the center, and place a poached egg into it. Or make a circular nest of the hot rice, freshly cooked, and drop the poached egg into it.
Five presentations for a single poached egg, written for a sickroom tray where appearance was expected to do half the work of the appetite. The cooking is trivial; the assembly is the point, and most of it has to be done while the egg is still hot.
- Poach first, assemble fastEverything here is built around one egg that cools quickly. Have the toast log cabin, spinach, potato or rice ready and waiting, then poach and plate immediately.
- Poaching waterWater at a bare shiver, around 180-190F, with a spoonful of vinegar; a rolling boil shreds the white. Three minutes gives a set white and a soft yolk, four to five sets the yolk through.
- Eggs for a sick trayEggs -- A soft yolk is not fully pasteurized. If the person eating is elderly, pregnant, very young or immunocompromised, use pasteurized shell eggs or cook the yolk firm.
- Building the cabinCut the strips from firm, well-dried toast and stack them log-house fashion in two squared-off pairs; soft fresh toast collapses. The broken toast in the base will soak up the yolk.
- The paper flagSkip the paste and the toothpick mast if the tray is going to a child or anyone drowsy. A small flag folded over the top of a wooden pick and set beside the egg rather than stuck into it does the same job without a swallowing hazard.
- Spinach nestCook and drain the spinach hard -- press it in a sieve -- then toss with butter. Wet spinach floods the plate and the egg slides off.
- Potato shellsBake at 400F for about an hour so the skin is stiff enough to hold its shape once scooped. Mash the flesh loosely; a stiff, over-worked filling will not cradle the egg.
- Rice nestsShort-grain or a soft-cooked long-grain will pack and turn out of a mold; parboiled rice will not hold together. The molded version can be made ahead and warmed, the hot circular nest cannot.
- The white sauceThin means pourable -- roughly one tablespoon each butter and flour to a cup of milk. Season it properly.
- YieldEach numbered variation serves one.
"Invalid cookery" was a standing chapter in many American and British household books from the mid-nineteenth century into the 1930s, back when a long convalescence at home was ordinary and the tray that went upstairs three times a day was a real domestic problem. Eggs, milk, beef tea, rice and toast were the accepted foundation of sickroom diet, being thought light and easily digested. If these five presentations come from such a chapter, the whimsy of the log cabin, the flag and the nests reads as a device for coaxing a listless appetite; the same instinct shows up in the nursery cookery of the period, and the flag and toast cabin would suit a child's tray equally well. The five variations are essentially one dish dressed five ways.