Eggs à la Lee
Cover circular pieces of toasted bread with thin slices cold boiled ham. Arrange on each a dropped egg, and pour around Mushroom Purée. Clean one-fourth pound mushrooms, break caps in pieces, and sauté five minutes in one tablespoon butter. Add one cup chicken stock and simmer five minutes. Rub through a sieve and thicken with one tablespoon each butter and flour cooked together. Season with salt and pepper.
A composed egg dish of the sort that filled American breakfast and luncheon menus around 1900: toast, ham, a poached egg, and a sauce. Nothing here is difficult, but the vocabulary needs translating.
- "Dropped egg" means poachedThe Boston Cooking School used "dropped" for an egg broken into simmering water rather than into fat. Salted water, barely trembling, three to five minutes for a set white and liquid yolk.
- Toast roundsCut the bread with a biscuit cutter before toasting so the edges brown evenly, and size the round to the ham slice rather than the other way around.
- The ham"Cold boiled ham" is any good cooked ham sliced thin. Deli-counter ham works; a thick slab throws the proportions off and makes the assembly hard to cut with a fork.
- Caps onlyThe recipe breaks up the caps and says nothing about the stems. Stems can go into the puree as well, since it is sieved, but they darken it.
- Sieving versus blendingRubbing through a sieve was the usual way to get a smooth puree in a kitchen of this period. A blender or immersion blender does it in seconds; pass it through a fine strainer afterward if you want the texture the book intended.
- Thicken after, not beforeThe tablespoon each of butter and flour is cooked together separately and whisked into the hot purée. Add it in pieces and let it simmer a minute or two so the flour loses its raw taste; the sauce should coat a spoon, not stand up on it.
- QuantityA quarter pound of mushrooms and one cup of stock make roughly a cup of finished sauce. Scale the eggs, ham, and toast to match.
- Assembly and timingHave the purée finished and warm before the eggs go into the water. A poached egg held more than a minute or two on toast begins to soak through.
The dish is one of a number of American "eggs ecperiod's cookery books. Who Lee was is not recorded in the book, and such names were often borrowed from a patron, a chef, or a house where the dish was served; the attribution should be treated as traditional rather than documented. What is characteristic of Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book is the discipline of the sauce, spelled out in exact tablespoons and cups within the body of the recipe, since the school's whole project was to replace the pinch and the handful with level measurements. The mushroom pur husiasm for cultivated mushrooms, which are often said to have been becoming more widely available to American cooks around this period.