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Poached Eggs in Cream
Put half cup of cream sauce into shallow dish or agate pie tin. Open eggs carefully and place on sauce; put in another pan of boiling water until eggs are set or are as firm as desired (from 10 to 15 minutes). Cover with half cup of cream sauce, sprinkle with chopped parsley and dust with paprika. The cream sauce is made as usual, adding a little grated onion, if desired.
Despite the name, nothing here is poached in water. The eggs sit on cream sauce in a shallow dish that is set over or into boiling water, so they set gently in a bain-marie — closer to eggs en cocotte than to a true poach.
- The hingeThe recipe says boiling water, but a bare simmer is kinder. Vigorous heat sets the whites firm before the yolks have thickened, and the sauce beneath can separate.
- Agate pie tinAgateware is speckled enamel over steel, common in kitchens of this era. Any shallow flameproof or heatproof dish works; the point is that it be wide and low so the eggs sit in a single layer.
- "Another pan of boiling water"The dish goes into or over the water pan, not floating loose. A wide skillet with an inch of simmering water, or a roasting pan as a water bath, both do the job. Cover the whole thing so steam sets the tops of the eggs.
- Cream sauce made as usualThe book assumes you know it. A standard period white sauce is 1 tablespoon butter with 1 to 2 tablespoons flour, cooked together without browning, then 1 cup of milk or thin cream whisked in and simmered until thickened. Season with salt and white pepper. One cup covers the two half-cups called for here.
- Grated onionA teaspoon of onion grated on the fine side of a box grater, juice and all, stirred into the finished sauce. Raw grated onion stays sharp, so add it early enough to cook a minute or two in the sauce.
- TimingThe recipe's 10 to 15 minutes covers everything from just set to firm; the longer end gives whites fully set and yolks firm. For a yolk that still runs, start checking well before the ten-minute mark; residual heat in the sauce keeps cooking them after they leave the pan.
- YieldThe recipe does not say how many eggs. One cup of sauce total will stretch over a few of them; scale the sauce with the eggs rather than crowding more into the same dish.
This is a chafing-dish and invalid-cookery technique dressed up for the breakfast table. Through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, eggs cooked over water rather than in it were recommended for anyone with a delicate stomach — the slow, indirect heat keeps the protein tender in a way a hard boil does not — and the same method migrated onto hotel and tea-room menus as something more refined than a plain poached egg on toast. The paprika dusting is a period marker: cookbooks of the 1910s and 1920s reach for it constantly, usually for color on anything pale. Books of this kind filled out their egg and sauce chapters with exactly this sort of dependable, un-showy dish.