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Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Salmon
Cook half a cup of smoked salmon, cut into thin strips, in a tablespoonful of butter three or four minutes; then add to the eggs just before the cooking is finished.
Scrambled Eggs à la Union Club.
Heat one can of pimentos (sweet red peppers) in boiling salted water; drain, and serve on rounds
This is an addendum to a base scrambled-egg recipe printed earlier in the chafing-dish chapter, and the last sentence belongs to the next recipe entirely, cut off mid-page. Treat it as a technique note rather than a standalone formula.
- The missing base"the eggs" refers to a plain scrambled-egg recipe printed earlier in the book, which is not reproduced on this page. Half a cup of salmon strips suits a modest family-sized quantity of eggs.
- The hinge — add at the endThe hinge goes in just before the cooking is finished, exactly as the text directs. Added earlier, smoked salmon tends to tighten and to shed salt and moisture into the curd.
- Three or four minutes is longThat timing suits the firmer, more heavily cured smoked salmon usual when the book was written. Modern cold-smoked salmon is softer and more lightly cured; thirty to sixty seconds in the butter is enough to warm it and scent the fat. Hot-smoked salmon needs no cooking at all, only flaking in.
- SaltSeason the eggs lightly or not at all until the salmon is in, since cured fish varies enormously in salinity.
- Chafing dish versus stovetopGentle heat -- if a chafing dish with its water pan is used, it works as a double boiler and the eggs cannot exceed boiling point. Over direct heat, keep it very low and pull the pan off while the curd is still glossy, since it carries on setting.
- The stray sentence"Scrambled Eggs à la Union Club" is a separate recipe whose text breaks off here. The rounds it mentions are probably rounds of toast, though the page does not say.
Chafing-dish cookery was a genuine craze in American cities around 1900, tied to late suppers, bachelor apartments, club rooms and after-theatre entertaining, where a spirit lamp on the sideboard let a host cook at the table without a kitchen or a servant. Eggs were its staple, since the water-jacketed pan is nearly foolproof for them. Smoked salmon fits the pattern of the period's chafing-dish repertoire: something shelf-stable, salty and already cooked or cured, that could be kept in the sideboard and dropped into eggs on short notice. The "Union Club" name attached to the following recipe is typical of the era's habit of borrowing prestige from metropolitan gentlemen's clubs.