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Pepper (Yolks eggs Stale bread crumbs)
Yolks 3 eggs Stale bread crumbs Grated chcese Poach eggs and dry on a towel. Cook butter with onion three minutes. Add flour and, gradually, stock. Season with salt and pepper; then add yolks of eggs slightly beaten. Cook one minute, and cool. Cover eggs with mixture, roll in bread crumbs and cheese, using equal parts, dip in egg, again roll in crumbs, fry in deep fat, and drain on brown paper. These may be served with a thin sauce, using equal parts of white stock and cream, and seasoning with grated cheese, salt, and paprika.
The text has come down to us garbled — the header and ingredient list are fragments of a page that also carried other entries, so the butter, onion, flour and stock that the method calls for never got their quantities. Everything you need to know to reconstruct it is in the procedure, but you are working from technique rather than measurement.
- The missing ingredientsThe method requires butter, chopped onion, flour and stock in addition to the three egg yolks, crumbs and cheese named in the fragment. A very thick sauce is wanted; something on the order of 2 tablespoons butter, 1 tablespoon minced onion, 3 tablespoons flour and 3/4 cup stock, thickened further by the yolks, will give it, though those quantities are a reconstruction and appear nowhere in the text.
- The hinge: chill the coated eggsThe sauce must be cooled until it is stiff enough to be spread on a slippery poached egg by hand, and the crumbed eggs should go back into the refrigerator until firm before frying. Warm coating slides off in the fat and the egg bursts.
- Poach them firmFor a dish that will be handled, breaded and deep fried, poach the eggs three to four minutes so the whites are fully set, then trim the ragged edges with scissors after drying. A soft yolk is the point; a soft white is not.
- Deep fat375F, and only until the crumbs are golden — about a minute. The interior is already cooked, so longer frying only sets the yolk and toughens the coating.
- White stockAn unbrowned veal or chicken stock. Any light chicken stock works; avoid anything dark or heavily reduced, which will muddy both the colour and the flavour.
- Grated cheeseA dry grating cheese; Parmesan is the usual choice, though the fragment does not specify. Mixed half and half with the crumbs, as the recipe directs, it browns fast, which is another reason to keep the frying brief.
- Brown paperGrocer's paper was the standard draining surface. Paper towels or a wire rack over a tray do the same job better.
- YieldThree eggs, three servings as a first course or lunch dish. The accompanying sauce — equal parts white stock and cream with cheese, salt and paprika — should be thin enough to pool on the plate.
Deep-fried poached eggs belong to the elaborate egg cookery of the French repertoire that the American cooking schools drew on, where a poached egg was treated as a filling to be masked in thick sauce, crumbed and fried like a croquette; the technique is the same one used for croquettes of chicken or sweetbreads, and the book's egg chapter carries several such transfers of method from one ingredient to another. The garbled state of this particular entry, with its header reading "Pepper" and its ingredient list broken off, looks like an artifact of the scanning of a crowded page rather than anything the author did.