Buttered Eggs
Heat omelet pan. Put in one tablespoon butter; when melted, slip in an egg, and cook until the white is firm. Turn it over once while cooking. Add more butter as needed, using just enough to keep egg from sticking.
This is a fried egg cooked gently in butter rather than in hot fat, and it turns on temperature more than anything else.
- Keep the pan moderateThe butter should foam but never brown. Over high heat the white sets with crisp lace edges, which is a different dish; the recipe gives no heat setting, but a gently and evenly set white appears to be the aim.
- The omelet panIn 1896 this meant a small, shallow, heavy iron or steel pan kept for eggs; the recipe gives no dimensions. A well-seasoned cast iron or nonstick pan of similar size does the same job.
- Butter quantityA tablespoon per egg reads as a lot by modern habit; it is the cooking medium, not a garnish. Use enough to film the pan generously and add a little more as each new egg goes in.
- Turning onceThat single flip makes what a diner would call over easy or over medium. Slide a thin spatula fully under the set white before turning or the yolk breaks; if you want the yolk soft, count no more than 20 to 30 seconds on the second side.
- Doneness"Until the white is firm" means firm throughout, including the thick albumen ringing the yolk. Two to three minutes on the first side over moderate heat is usually right.
- Cooking in batchesThe recipe is written in the singular, one egg at a time, which may be why butter is added as needed. Eggs cooked singly hold their shape; crowding the pan makes the whites run together and steam.
- YieldOne or two eggs per person. Season with salt and pepper after cooking, since salt on the raw white can leave pale speckles.
Fannie Farmer's egg chapter in The Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (1896) works methodically through every basic treatment — boiled, poached, scrambled, shirred, fried, buttered — on the assumption that a cook who has mastered each one can then combine them. "Buttered eggs" sits just beside "fried eggs," and the difference between them seems largely to be the fat, though the book does not spell this out: fried eggs in that era were commonly cooked in bacon or salt-pork drippings, often deep enough to baste, while buttered eggs use butter alone and less heat. Butter was the more genteel choice, and the more expensive one. The direction to turn the egg once reflects the standard American expectation of the period that a fried egg be cooked on both sides.