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Eggs with Spinach
Prepare in the same manner, using for one cup of chopped spinach one-third the quantity of sauce given above. If convenient, the eggs may be poached in a second dish, and in milk, water or stock.
Eggs. (Italian Style.) Cut six cold, hard-boiled eggs into eighths lengthwise; add these, with a cup of cooked macaroni and half a cup of grated Parmesan cheese, to two cups of white sauce, at the boiling-point, in the blazer. Set over hot water, add a teaspoonful of onion juice, a teaspoonful of chopped parsley, salt and anchovy essence to taste, and serve very hot.
Two dishes run together here: a spinach-and-egg variant that depends on a preceding recipe, and a self-contained "Italian Style" eggs with macaroni. The second stands alone and is the one worth cooking.
- The blazerThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, used directly over the flame. "Set over hot water" means lifting it into the water pan beneath — a double boiler. Any wide saucepan set over a pot of simmering water does the same job.
- The missing sauceThe spinach variant refers to "the sauce given above" from the preceding recipe in the book, which is not reproduced here, so the actual amount cannot be recovered: it is one-third of whatever that recipe called for (about two-thirds of a cup if, like the dish below, it used two cups). Read it as one cup chopped cooked spinach folded into that sauce, with the eggs poached — the recipe allows them to be poached separately in milk, water or stock.
- White sauceTwo cups means a standard béchamel: 3 tablespoons butter, 3 tablespoons flour, 2 cups milk, cooked until it no longer tastes of raw flour. The recipe has the sauce at boiling point when the cheese and eggs go in, then moved over hot water; keeping it off direct heat after that stops the Parmesan going grainy.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled condiment of anchovy, salt and spice, still sold in Britain. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or a teaspoon of fish sauce, gives the same salty depth. Add it before the salt and taste as you go; both are salty, as is the Parmesan.
- Onion juiceGrate half a small onion and press the pulp through a sieve, or press it in a garlic press. A teaspoonful is about what one half-onion yields. Grated onion left in whole will not soften in a double boiler.
- Cooked macaroniA cup of cooked short macaroni, drained but not rinsed. Cook it a minute short of al dente since it sits in hot sauce before serving.
- Handling the eggsHard-boiled eggs cut in eighths lengthwise are fragile. Fold them in at the very end and stir as little as possible, or you will end up with sauce flecked with yolk rather than distinct wedges.
- YieldSix eggs, a cup of macaroni and two cups of sauce serve four as a lunch or supper dish, three if it is the whole meal. Serve it the moment it is hot; it thickens and dulls on standing.
Chafing-dish cookery had a real vogue in American cities around 1900, when a spirit lamp and a nickel-plated blazer let a hostess cook at the table without a servant or a kitchen — ideal for the late supper after a theatre or a card party, and for the bachelor flats and college rooms of the period. The repertoire was accordingly built on things already cooked: hard-boiled eggs, leftover macaroni, a jug of white sauce, cheese and a bottled savoury essence. The "Italian style" label here signals little more than macaroni and Parmesan, which was how Italian cooking was generally represented in English-language books of the day; anchovy essence and onion juice are thoroughly Anglo-American touches. Anchovy essence itself belongs to the older English tradition of fish-based store sauces, a tradition it is often said to share with Worcestershire, and it appears throughout period cookbooks as one way to add savour before commercial bouillon cubes were common.