Home › Poultry And Game › Pepper (Cup buttered cracker crumbs)
Pepper (Cup buttered cracker crumbs)
2/3 cup buttered cracker crumbs 4 eggs Cook butter five minutes with vegetables, add flour, and gradually the stock. Strain, add chicken dice, and season with salt and pepper. Turn on a slightly buttered platter and sprinkle with cracker crumbs. Make four nests, and in each nest slip an egg; cover eggs with crumbs, and bake in a moderate oven until whites of eggs are firm.
The page has come down to us truncated — only the last two ingredients of the list survive, along with the method. What is described is a thick creamed-chicken hash spread on a platter, hollowed into four nests, each holding a whole baked egg. The proportions can be reconstructed from the method itself.
- The missing ingredient listThe method calls for butter, vegetables (unspecified on the page; a mirepoix of onion, carrot and celery would suit), flour, stock and diced cooked chicken; only the crumbs and eggs are printed. A workable base is 1/4 cup butter, 1/4 cup flour and 1 1/2 cups chicken stock to about 2 cups of diced cooked chicken. Treat any figure not on the page as a reconstruction, not a reading.
- Buttered cracker crumbsCrumbs from plain soda or common crackers, tossed with melted butter at roughly 1 tablespoon butter per 1/3 cup crumbs. Panko will brown faster and taste less of the period; crushed saltines are the closest supermarket match.
- "Cook butter five minutes with vegetables"This is sweating, not browning — the vegetables go soft and translucent over low heat, then the flour goes in to make the roux. Keep the heat down so the flour does not colour; the finished sauce should be pale.
- Strain, then thicken hardThe vegetables are flavouring only and are discarded with the straining. The sauce must be thick enough to hold a hollow — closer to a stiff croquette mixture than a gravy. If it slumps on the platter the eggs will run out of their nests.
- Moderate ovenRoughly 350-375F. Anything hotter sets the crumb topping and the egg whites at different rates, and you get scorched crumbs over raw white.
- How long for the eggsExpect 12 to 15 minutes at 350F for firm whites, a few minutes more if the chicken base has cooled. The original stops at "until whites of eggs are firm" and says nothing about the yolks, which at that point will still be soft.
- VesselA metal or ovenproof ceramic platter, or a shallow gratin dish. A serving platter of thin china or one with a decorative rim is not a baking dish and may crack.
- YieldFour nests, four servings — a lunch or supper dish rather than a dinner course. It is best assembled and baked to order, since reheating hardens the yolks.
Baked egg nests were a standing device in turn-of-the-century American cookery: a savoury base spread flat, hollowed, and given a whole egg per portion so that the yolk broke into a sauce at the table. This is a recognisable relative of chicken à la king and creamed chicken on toast — dishes built to use up the cooked meat left from a roast fowl at a time when a whole chicken was an expensive purchase and nothing was thrown out. The velouté technique behind it, butter and flour cooked with aromatics and let down with stock, is generally traced to French professional practice, simplified for a household cook working without a brigade. The buttered cracker crumb topping is the distinctly Yankee note: commercial soda crackers were cheap and everywhere by the 1890s, and they stood in for the breadcrumbs a European kitchen would have used.