Eggs à la Tripe
Serve dropped eggs on Lobster Croquettes (see p. 558) shaped in flat round cakes one-half inch thick. Garnish with lobster claws and parsley.
This is an assembly instruction rather than a full recipe: it assumes you already have the croquette mixture from elsewhere in the book and know what a dropped egg is. Two components, both time-sensitive, so plan the order of work.
- "Dropped eggs" means poachedIn Farmer's vocabulary a dropped egg is an egg broken into barely simmering salted water and cooked until the white is set and the yolk still soft, roughly 3 to 4 minutes. Vinegar in the water is optional and is not called for here.
- Shape the croquettes flatThe mixture is formed into half-inch cakes rather than the usual cones or cylinders, presumably so an egg will sit on top without rolling off. A cake of about 2 1/2 to 3 inches across will support the egg fully.
- Chill before breadingA lobster croquette mixture is a thick white sauce bound with the meat, and it should be chilled until firm before crumbing and frying. Warm mixture bursts in the fat.
- Frying fatThe book's test for fat hot enough for a cooked mixture is a bread cube that browns in 40 seconds (roughly 375F in modern terms). Fry in small batches and drain on paper; the cakes are already cooked through and need only color.
- Timing the two partsPoach the eggs last, or hold them in warm water and drain them on a towel just before plating. Croquettes lose their crust quickly under a wet egg, so assemble at the table's edge, not in advance.
- Lobster claws as garnishThe claws are decorative only. Nothing is lost by skipping them; a wedge of lemon serves the same purpose of cutting the fried richness.
- Yield and courseFigure one croquette and one egg per person as a luncheon or supper dish, two for a main course. A hollandaise or a thin cream sauce is a reasonable addition, though Farmer specifies none.
The name is borrowed and slightly misapplied. Classic French "œufs à la tripe" is hard-boiled eggs sliced into a creamy onion sauce; the usual explanation is that the sliced whites in their pale sauce recalled a dish of tripe, though this is traditional lore rather than established etymology, and the eggs have nothing to do with tripe itself. Farmer's version keeps the borrowed title for something else entirely: a poached egg set on a fried lobster cake, in the manner of the composed egg dishes common on American hotel and club menus of the period. That looseness with French names is characteristic of the time, when a kitchen French phrase signaled refinement whether or not it described what was on the plate. Lobster is equally of its moment; improved shipping had made lobster meat readily available to the Boston Cooking School's chafing-dish and croquette repertoire.