Poached Eggs
Break eggs and drop carefully one at a time into boiling water in shallow frying pan. Cook slowly until eggs are set. Remove each with skimmer and serve on toast garnished with parsley.
A four-line method that assumes a cook already knows what a set egg looks like. The gaps worth filling are the water temperature, the pan, and the freshness of the eggs.
- Do not actually boilThe instruction says boiling water then "cook slowly," which is a contradiction resolved in practice by dropping the heat the moment the eggs go in. Water at a bare shiver, around 180-185F, sets the white without shredding it into rags.
- Egg age is the hingeA very fresh egg has a thick white that clings to the yolk and holds a compact shape. Older supermarket eggs spread into wisps no matter how careful the technique. If the whites are thin, tip each egg into a fine sieve first and let the loose watery portion drain away.
- A splash of vinegarA tablespoon of white vinegar per quart of water firms the outer white on contact. It is not called for in the original.
- The shallow frying panA wide, shallow pan is genuinely the right vessel here, not an eccentricity: it lets each egg sit on the bottom rather than sink through a deep column of water, and it makes lifting them out with a skimmer easy. Two to three inches of water is enough.
- TimingThree minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk; four to four and a half firms the yolk to a jammy centre. The recipe gives no time at all.
- Drain before servingLift each egg with the skimmer and rest it briefly on a folded towel or the edge of the pan. Otherwise the water runs straight into the toast.
- YieldReckon one or two eggs and one slice of toast per person. Poach no more than four at a time or the water temperature drops and the timing goes to pieces.
Poaching is one of the oldest ways of cooking an egg out of its shell, and the English word comes from the French poche, a pocket or pouch, the set white forming a pouch around the yolk. Egg chapters in early twentieth-century American cookbooks are often brief and instructional in this way, and the recipes read less as inspiration than as a checklist. The garnish of parsley and the bed of toast were common conventions of the period: toast gave the egg something to sit on and soaked up the yolk, and a sprig of green was a standard way to make a plain white-and-yellow plate look finished.