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Eggs à la Commodore
Cut slices of bread in circular pieces and sauté in butter. Remove a portion of centre, leaving a rim one-fourth inch wide. Spread cavity thus made with pâté de foie gras purée, place a poached egg in each and pour over a rich brown or Béchamel sauce to which is added a few drops vinegar. Garnish with chopped truffles.
Eggs, Waldorf Style Arrange poached eggs on circular pieces of buttered toast, surround with Brown Mushroom Sauce (see p. 268), and place a broiled mushroom cap on each egg.
Two hotel-style egg dishes, printed here without a break between them — the Waldorf version at the end is a separate recipe, not a final step. Both are assembly jobs, so have the sauce hot and the toast cut before the eggs go into the water.
- The hinge: poach soft, serve at onceThe dish depends on a liquid yolk running into the pâté and sauce. Three minutes in barely shivering water for a large egg, then lift, blot on a towel, and plate immediately; eggs held in warm water past five minutes set firm and the whole point is lost.
- Cutting the casesUse day-old firm white bread, cut fairly thick. A 3-inch round cutter for the outside and a 2½-inch one pressed part-way down for the well, which gives the quarter-inch rim the recipe asks for, then lift the centre out with a knife tip. Sauté in clarified butter or the rims scorch before the middle colours.
- Pâté de foie gras puréeAt this date that would usually have been imported tinned goose-liver paste, thinned and sieved smooth. Foie gras is expensive and its sale is restricted in some jurisdictions; a good chicken-liver pâté or mousse, worked with a little cream until it spreads, gives much the same effect. A teaspoon per case is enough.
- "Rich brown or Béchamel"Brown sauce here means an espagnole-type reduction; Béchamel is the white sauce. Either works, and the recipe treats the vinegar as part of the dish rather than an option — a few drops, of cider or white wine vinegar, added off the heat.
- TrufflesFresh truffle is unnecessary at this scale. Tinned truffle peelings, drained and chopped fine, or a scant smear of truffle paste stirred into the sauce reads correctly. Truffle oil tastes of something else entirely.
- YieldNeither version is given a quantity. Figure one round per person as a first course, two as a light supper dish, and sauce at about 2 tablespoons per egg.
- For the Waldorf variationThe Brown Mushroom Sauce cross-referenced to page 268 is presumably a brown sauce finished with mushrooms. Broil the cap gill-side up with butter, 4–5 minutes, so the juices collect rather than run over the egg.
Both dishes belong to the American hotel and club cookery that Fannie Farmer was recording for home cooks in the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book — poached eggs on a fried or toasted round, dressed with a sauce and a garnish, then named after whoever or wherever the version came from. The naming convention follows French restaurant practice, where à la plus a title generally identified a garnish rather than a method; "Commodore" carries the same faintly nautical, faintly grand air as other dishes of the period titled after admirals, ambassadors and financiers, and the Waldorf name points to New York's Waldorf hotel, one of the most imitated kitchens of the day. What makes the pair worth noting is the pâté: tinned foie gras from Strasbourg and Périgord was to be had on American grocers' luxury shelves by this date, and its appearance in a book aimed at middle-class housekeepers suggests how far imported delicacies had reached down the market. The larger context is the egg chapter itself, which runs to many variations — an economical protein dressed up in as many ways as a cook could manage, which is precisely what these two recipes are doing.