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Poached Eggs with Celery
2 cups celery. 4 eggs. 4 pieces toasted bread. 1 cup cream sauce. Cut celery in half-inch pieces, cook until tender in salted water. Have toast ready, dip in hot, salted water or milk for an instant, spread lightly with butter, while eggs are cooking. Drain celery put into white sauce, spread on bread and put an egg on top of each piece. (Have a little salt in the water or milk in which the bread is dipped).
A simple supper dish of the sort that filled the egg chapters of American cookbooks a century ago. Nothing here is obscure; the only things worth pinning down are the quantities the original leaves loose and the poaching itself.
- The cream sauceThe recipe gives no proportions. A medium white sauce is the usual reading: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk or thin cream, cooked until it coats a spoon. Season it, since the celery water carries off flavour rather than adding it.
- Celery quantityTwo cups of half-inch pieces is roughly four to five large ribs. Use the paler inner ribs and strip the coarse strings from any outer stalks, or the finished dish will be fibrous.
- Cook the celery brieflyThe recipe says only "until tender"; eight to ten minutes in salted water is enough for half-inch pieces to keep some bite. Drain it thoroughly before it goes into the sauce or the sauce will thin and slide off the toast.
- Poaching the eggsThe recipe assumes you know how. Barely simmering water, a spoonful of vinegar if you like, three minutes for a set white and a liquid yolk. The yolk is meant to run into the celery and sauce, so do not cook them hard.
- Dipping the toastThis is the step people skip and should not. A one-second dip in hot salted milk keeps the toast from turning to board under the sauce while still leaving it firm enough to lift. Do it just before assembling, not in advance.
- YieldFour pieces of toast, four eggs: one serving each as a light lunch or supper, two if you want it to be a meal on its own.
Poached eggs on toast with a sauce and a vegetable belong to a whole family of "made dishes" that let a household stretch four eggs into a meal. Mary A. Wilson wrote in the years around the First World War, when domestic-science teaching and wartime food conservation both pushed cooks toward eggs, milk sauces and vegetables in place of meat. Celery, cheap and plentiful from autumn through winter and often grown in blanched trenches for the pale ribs cooks preferred, was a standard household vegetable rather than the raw garnish it has largely become; boiled and bound in white sauce, it turns up in this period as a side dish, a soup, and a filling for exactly this kind of toast.