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Stirred Eggs
1/2 teaspoon salt 1/2 saltspoon pepper 1 tablespoon butter 1/2 cup brown sauce 5 eggs 1 tablespoon chopped parsley Buttered toast Melt the butter; add the gravy; when hot stir in the beaten eggs. Season and stir until the eggs thicken. Serve on toast and sprinkle with parsley.
A chafing-dish supper dish: scrambled eggs enriched with brown sauce, which turns them savoury and gravy-coloured rather than pale and creamy. The whole thing hinges on gentle heat.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned a quarter teaspoon, so the 1/2 saltspoon of pepper here is about 1/8 teaspoon of ground black pepper — a scant pinch. Salt at 1/2 teaspoon for five eggs is roughly modern practice.
- Brown sauceNot the bottled British condiment. In a 1900s American kitchen this is a plain roux-based brown sauce or a reduced meat gravy, made from stock browned with butter and flour. A half cup of good beef or veal gravy, or a well-made demi-glace thinned with stock, does the job.
- The chafing dishThe recipe itself names no equipment; if it belongs to a chafing-dish chapter, it would be made in the blazer pan over a spirit lamp, ideally with the hot-water pan underneath, which caps the heat so the eggs cannot catch. On a stove, use the lowest burner setting or a bowl over barely simmering water.
- Stop earlyStir until the eggs just thicken and still look glossy and loose — they carry on setting off the heat, and a chafing dish keeps radiating warmth at the table. Cooked to firm curds they weep liquid and the sauce separates.
- Adding the eggsBeat the eggs only enough to combine, and pour them into the hot butter-and-gravy mixture off the direct flame, stirring at once. Hitting them with a hot pan all at once gives you strands of overcooked egg in gravy.
- YieldFive eggs makes two generous or three modest servings. Have the toast buttered and waiting; the eggs will not wait for it.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine craze in American middle-class homes from the 1890s through the 1910s, and chapters devoted to it were a common feature of general cookbooks of the period. The appeal was social as much as culinary: the spirit-lamp dish let a hostess cook at the table without servants, which suited late suppers after the theatre or a card party. The repertoire ran heavily to eggs, oysters, creamed shellfish and rarebits — things that cook in minutes over a low flame. Stirring brown sauce into scrambled eggs suggests what is often said to have been the era's habit of keeping a stockpot and a made sauce on hand; a half cup of yesterday's gravy turned a plain egg dish into something that read as a proper savoury course.