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Eggs à la Benedict
Split and toast English muffins. Sauté circular pieces of cold boiled ham, place these over the halves of muffins, arrange on each a dropped egg, and pour around Hollandaise Sauce II (see p. 274), diluted with cream to make of such consistency to pour easily.
A four-line recipe that assumes you already know how to poach an egg and make hollandaise. The assembly is trivial; everything depends on timing and on the sauce.
- "Dropped egg" means poachedA dropped egg is slipped from the shell into salted water and cooked until the white is set. It is not fried and not coddled in the shell; see the book's own directions for dropped eggs for the timing.
- The hinge is the sauceHollandaise curdles if it gets too hot and stiffens as it cools. Make it last, hold it in a bowl over warm — not simmering — water, and thin it with cream just before serving as directed. The recipe has the sauce poured around rather than over the egg.
- Hollandaise Sauce IIThe second of the book's two hollandaise recipes, cross-referenced to p. 274; check the proportions there. Any standard hollandaise works; make it slightly stiff so the cream can loosen it without turning it thin.
- The hamCold boiled ham means a cooked, wet-cured ham cut in rounds the size of the muffin. Canadian bacon or back bacon gives the closest result today; a slice of deli ham is thinner and will curl. Sauté only long enough to warm and colour the edges.
- English muffinsSplit with a fork rather than a knife to preserve the rough crumb that holds sauce, and toast until dry and firm — a soft muffin collapses under the egg.
- Order of workSauce first and held warm, ham next and kept in the pan, muffins toasted, eggs poached last and lifted out on a slotted spoon onto a towel to drain. Water clinging to the egg will slacken the hollandaise.
- YieldThe original gives no quantity. Reckon two muffin halves, two eggs and about a quarter cup of sauce per person; a batch of hollandaise from three yolks serves four.
Eggs à la Benedict entered American cookbooks around the turn of the twentieth century, and its origin is contested in two competing New York stories, both traditional rather than documented. One credits a Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, a regular at Delmonico's, whose request for something new is said to have produced the dish that Charles Ranhofer printed as "Eggs à la Benedick" in The Epicurean (1894), there built on toasted muffin with ham and hollandaise. The other comes from Lemuel Benedict, a broker who claimed in a 1940s interview to have ordered the components at the Waldorf as a hangover cure. What is certain is that by the time this recipe appeared in the Boston Cooking-School book it had become a restaurant dish being handed to home cooks, which is why the instructions are so brisk: the reader was expected to have the hollandaise and the poached egg already in hand, and needed only the assembly.