Bacon and Eggs
Have the bacon cut into very thin slices; put them in a frying pan over a slow fire until most of the fat is extracted. Remove the bacon; break the eggs into the pan carefully; season and cook until the whites are set; lift out with a cake-turner and serve immediately, garnished with the bacon.
A plain instruction sheet rather than a recipe with quantities, and the technique still holds: render the bacon slowly, then use its fat as the cooking medium for the eggs.
- Slow fireA wood or coal range's "slow fire" is a low burner, roughly medium-low on gas. Bacon started hot seizes and curls before the fat runs; started cool it renders evenly and crisps flat.
- Very thin slicesModern supermarket bacon is generally cut thicker than the very thin slices called for here. Standard-cut rashers work, but they take noticeably longer to render.
- Pour off the surplusThe recipe renders until most of the fat is extracted but never says to pour any off. A deep layer of hot grease will fry the whites lacy and brown before the yolk warms; leave about a tablespoon and save the rest.
- "Until the whites are set"This is the hinge, and it means the whites are opaque all the way to the yolk with no clear jelly around it, not merely firm at the edges. On low heat that is 3-4 minutes; the yolk stays runny. Covering the pan for the last minute sets the film over the yolk without flipping.
- Cake-turnerA thin metal spatula, then and now. Modern nonstick calls for a flexible plastic or silicone turner instead, and slide it under the whole white rather than cutting between eggs.
- SeasoningSeason the whites rather than the yolks; salt sprinkled directly on a yolk is commonly said to leave pale speckles where it draws out moisture. Bacon fat is already salted, so go lightly.
- YieldTwo eggs and two or three slices of bacon per person is a reasonable reckoning, though the recipe itself gives no quantities. How many will fit at once, if you want to lift them out whole, depends on the pan.
Bacon and eggs was already an unremarkable fixture of the American and British breakfast table by the time this loose-leaf book was compiled in the early twentieth century, which is why it earns so few words and no measurements at all: the author expected the reader to know the dish and to want only the order of operations. The detail that matters historically is the instruction to render the fat first and cook the eggs in it, standard practice in an era when cooking fat was generally thought too valuable to discard. The pairing's fame as *the* national breakfast is often traced to Progressive-era and 1920s advertising by American meat packers, though the combination itself is very much older than any campaign for it.