Home › Recipes For The Chafing-Dish › Pepper (Eggs teaspoon vinegar Put one)
Pepper (Eggs teaspoon vinegar Put one)
4 eggs 1 teaspoon vinegar Put one tablespoon butter in a hot chafing-dish; when melted, slip in carefully four eggs, one at a time. Sprinkle with salt and pepper, and cook until whites are firm. Remove to a hot platter, care being taken not to break yolks. In same dish brown two tablespoons butter, add vinegar, and pour over eggs.
This is oeufs au beurre noir — fried eggs with browned butter and vinegar — set out for the chafing-dish table. The ingredient list has been scrambled in transcription, but the method carries everything you need.
- What you actually needFour eggs, one teaspoon vinegar, and three tablespoons butter in total: one for frying, two for the sauce. Salt and pepper to taste. The mangled heading is an artifact of the original ingredient column, not a missing ingredient.
- The chafing-dish setupUse the blazer pan directly over the flame, not over the hot-water bath. Eggs need real contact heat to set the whites; a water pan tops out near boiling and will leave you with something closer to a slow coddle.
- The hinge: brown the butter after the eggs leaveTwo tablespoons of butter go from nut-brown to acrid black in well under a minute. Get the eggs onto the hot platter first, raise the flame, and watch the milk solids — pull it the moment they turn hazelnut and smell toasted.
- Adding the vinegarIt will spit when it hits hot butter. Take the pan off the flame, add the vinegar, swirl, and pour at once. A plain white wine or cider vinegar suits it; malt is too assertive.
- "Until whites are firm"Perhaps three minutes over moderate heat. The recipe gives no time and says only that the whites should be firm and the yolks unbroken, which suggests the yolks are left soft. If you want them set, cover the pan for the last minute rather than cooking longer uncovered, which toughens the whites.
- Butter for fryingWhole butter at fry temperature browns fast under the eggs. Keep the flame moderate, or clarify the first tablespoon so only the sauce butter carries the toasted flavor.
- YieldTwo servings at supper, four as a first course. The recipe scales badly past four eggs in one blazer — they crowd and steam.
Browned butter sharpened with vinegar is one of the oldest French egg sauces, generally traced to the same family of preparations as raie au beurre noir, skate with black butter, where the acid cuts the richness and the toasted milk solids supply the flavor. The chafing-dish recipe is a period document in itself: in the 1890s and 1900s the chafing dish was the equipment of the late supper, the bachelor's rooms, and the after-theatre party, a way of cooking at the table when there was no servant and no kitchen fire lit. Dishes chosen for it are almost all fast, small, and dramatic — eggs, oysters, welsh rarebit, creamed things — and here the butter performs for the guests before it reaches the plate.