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Eggs à la Buckingham
Make five slices milk toast, and arrange on platter. Use recipe for Scrambled Eggs, having the eggs slightly underdone. Pour eggs over toast, sprinkle with four tablespoons grated mild cheese. Put in oven to melt cheese, and finish cooking eggs.
A two-part assembly that depends entirely on restraint: the eggs are meant to leave the pan wet, because the oven finishes them. Everything else is straightforward.
- Milk toastIn period usage, bread toasted, buttered, and moistened with hot milk or a thin white sauce rather than soaked; the toast should be damp rather than sodden.
- The scrambled egg baseFarmer's scrambled eggs run about 6 eggs to 6 tablespoons milk, with salt, pepper and butter, cooked slowly. Six eggs is a reasonable quantity for five slices of toast; scale up if serving hungry people.
- Slightly underdone means very underdonePull the eggs when they are still glossy and loose, well short of the point you would normally serve them. They will set further from residual heat before the dish ever reaches the oven, and again under the cheese.
- Mild cheeseA young cheddar, Monterey Jack, or a mild American-style cheese. Aged or dry cheese breaks and turns oily under dry heat; four tablespoons grated is roughly an ounce, a light veil rather than a blanket.
- Oven heat and timeThe recipe gives no temperature; a hot oven for a few minutes, or a brief spell under the broiler, is enough to melt the cheese. Any longer and the eggs weep and the toast beneath goes to paste.
- Use an ovenproof platterThe recipe does not specify what kind of platter, but since it goes into the oven the dish needs to be ovenproof; a decorative china platter is a risk.
- YieldFive slices serve four to five at breakfast or lunch. Serve immediately; it does not hold.
Dishes named "Buckingham" turn up in American hotel and chafing-dish cookery of the late nineteenth century — usually meaning eggs scrambled or shirred with cheese and served on toast — the name is generally traced to the fashion for grand English titles on restaurant menus rather than to any documented connection with the Buckingham family or a particular hotel of that name, though several American hotels called Buckingham did exist. The dish sits among the eggs in the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, in a run of variations built on the same scrambled-egg and milk-toast foundations, which is how Fannie Farmer taught: master two base preparations, then combine them. It also reflects the period's enthusiasm for melted cheese on toast at the breakfast and supper table, the same impulse that made Welsh rabbit a staple of the chafing dish.