Home › Chafing-Dish Dainties › Scrambled Eggs with Cheese
Scrambled Eggs with Cheese
BEAT six eggs until whites and yolks are well mixed; add half a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of paprica and six tablespoonfuls of milk or cream.
Melt two tablespoonsful of butter in the blazer, pour in the egg mixture, and stir and scrape from the blazer as it thickens. Just before it comes to the proper consistency, sprinkle in half a cup of grated Parmesan cheese, still stirring as before, and turn down the flame or set the blazer into the bath. American dairy cheese may be used instead of the Parmesan.
A chafing-dish recipe that translates directly to a skillet, provided you keep the heat low and pull the eggs early.
- The blazer and the bathThe blazer is the upper pan of a chafing dish, set directly over the flame; the "bath" is the water pan beneath it, which turns the setup into a double boiler. In a modern kitchen, use a nonstick or well-seasoned skillet over low heat and slide it off the burner in place of "setting into the bath."
- The hinge: stop earlyEggs continue to set from residual heat, and the cheese adds more thickening as it melts. Take them off while they still look slightly looser than you want to serve them.
- Cheese timingHalf a cup of grated Parmesan is roughly 1.5 oz. Adding it at the end, as directed, is correct: stirred in from the start it weeps fat and makes the eggs grainy.
- PapricaAn older spelling of paprika, used here for colour and a mild warmth rather than heat.
- American dairy cheeseThis meant plain aged Cheddar-style factory cheese, not processed slices. A sharp Cheddar is the closest substitute, and it will need slightly gentler heat than Parmesan to avoid stringing.
- SaltHalf a teaspoon plus 1.5 oz of Parmesan is a fair amount of salt. Season lightly at the start and correct after the cheese goes in.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a main course, or four to six as part of a supper spread.
Chafing-dish cookery had a genuine vogue in American homes around 1900, and books like this one existed largely to serve it. The appeal was social: the dish sat on the table or sideboard over a spirit lamp, and the hostess cooked in front of her guests at late suppers, after the theatre, or in college rooms and bachelor apartments where there was no proper stove. The repertoire was accordingly limited to things that cook fast in one shallow pan — eggs, oysters, creamed shellfish, cheese mixtures like Welsh rarebit. Eggs scrambled with grated cheese belong squarely to that group, and the note that "American dairy cheese may be used instead of the Parmesan" is a useful marker of the period: imported Parmesan was available in cities but expensive, while domestic factory Cheddar was, by most accounts, the cheaper and more familiar alternative for grating.