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Poached Eggs à la Reine
Cover circular pieces of toasted bread with sliced fresh mushrooms sautéd in butter and moistened with cream. Poach eggs and arrange on mushrooms. Pour over all white sauce to which grated Parmesan cheese has been added. Sprinkle with grated cheese and put in oven to brown. Garnish with canned pimentoes cut in fancy shapes.
Fannie Farmer assumes you already know her white sauce and her method for poaching eggs, so the whole dish is written as an assembly. The only real difficulty is the last step: getting colour on the cheese without cooking the yolks solid.
- Brown fast, not longThe eggs are already cooked when they go into the oven, so the browning must be quick — a hot broiler for one to two minutes, or an oven at 450F for three or four. A moderate oven will set the yolks hard before the cheese takes colour. Poach the eggs a shade underdone (about 3 minutes) to allow for it.
- The white sauceA medium white sauce — 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 cup milk, with salt and pepper — is the base this assembly assumes. About 1/4 cup grated Parmesan stirred in off the heat is right for four servings; add it after the sauce has thickened.
- "Fresh mushrooms"Worth noting because canned and dried mushrooms were the usual alternatives when this was written. Ordinary cremini or white mushrooms, sliced and sautéd in butter until they have given up their water and started to colour, then loosened with a spoonful or two of cream — not enough to make them soupy, or the toast collapses.
- The toast roundsCut with a biscuit cutter, roughly 3 inches across, and toast them dry and firm. Soft or thin bread turns to paste under sauce and a poached egg. Day-old bread holds up better than fresh.
- Poaching waterSalted water at a bare simmer with a splash of vinegar; water at a hard boil tears the whites. Lift the eggs out with a slotted spoon and blot them on a towel, or the water thins the sauce.
- PimentoesCanned pimientos are still sold in jars, mild and already peeled. Roasted red pepper is the same thing in practice. Cut into strips or small diamonds rather than attempting the Victorian "fancy shapes"; the point is a spot of red against the pale sauce.
- YieldOne egg on one round of toast per person is a light lunch or supper dish; two is a full serving. Sauce quantities above cover four rounds generously.
- Assemble in the dish you serve fromBuild directly in a shallow buttered gratin dish or on individual heatproof plates. These do not transfer once sauced and browned.
The tag à la reine — "in the queen's style" — was applied loosely in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-American cookery to dishes enriched with cream, white sauce, or minced poultry, and it carried no fixed formula; a potage à la reine, a vol-au-vent à la reine and this egg dish share little beyond a pale, creamy sauce and an air of the dining room rather than the kitchen table. Its presence in the egg chapter of the Boston Cooking-School Cook Book reflects what Fannie Farmer's students were being trained for: a middle-class American household that wanted French names and restaurant presentation but built them from a small stock of standard preparations, in this case white sauce and a poached egg, learned once and then recombined endlessly. The garnish of canned pimientos is of its period: imported Spanish pimientos in tins were taken up by American cooks as a ready-made source of decorative colour, the same impulse that would later put them inside olives and into pimiento cheese.