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Poached Eggs with Sauce Bearnaise
Poach six eggs, arrange in serving dish, cover eggs alternately with red and yellow sauce, and garnish with parsley. Sauce Bearnaise. Beat yolks three eggs slightly, add three tablespoons olive oil, two tablespoons hot water, threefourths tablespoon tarragon vinegar, one-fourth teaspoon salt, and a few grains cayenne. Cook over boiling water until mixture thickens. Color one-half the sauce with Tomato Purée (tomatoes drained from their liquor, stewed, strained, and cooked until reduced to a thick pulp). 5 eggs 1/2 cup milk
A composed egg dish from Fannie Farmer's book, notable for a sauce that bears little resemblance to classic bearnaise. A few things need translating before it works on a modern stove.
- The hinge: gentle heatCook the yolk mixture in a bowl over simmering water, never with the bowl touching the water, and pull it off the heat while it is still pourable. Egg yolk sets around 150-158F, and this sauce has no butter to buffer it, so it goes granular fast.
- This is not textbook bearnaiseClassic bearnaise is a reduction of vinegar, shallot and tarragon mounted with clarified butter. Farmer's uses olive oil and hot water instead, making it closer to a warm emulsified dressing. Expect a lighter, sharper, more fragile sauce.
- Tarragon vinegarStill sold, but easily made by steeping a few bruised tarragon sprigs in white wine vinegar for a week. If you use plain white vinegar the sauce loses the one flavour that makes it bearnaise at all; add chopped fresh tarragon to compensate.
- Three-fourths tablespoonJust over two teaspoons. Worth measuring rather than eyeballing, since the sauce is small enough that the balance of acid to liquid shows.
- Tomato pureeFarmer means tomatoes drained of their liquor, stewed, strained and cooked down to a thick pulp, not the thin canned puree sold under that name in some markets. Modern tomato paste, thinned with a spoonful of the warm sauce, gives much the same colour and body with less work.
- The red-and-yellow arrangementDivide the finished sauce, tint half with the tomato, and spoon them over alternate eggs so the dish reads as a checker of colour. The two sauces are meant to stay separate on the plate.
- Poaching for a set platePoach in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, trim the ragged whites, and hold the eggs in warm water while you finish the sauce. Both components cool quickly, so plate immediately.
- The stray line"5 eggs 1/2 cup milk" at the end appears to be a stray fragment carried over from adjacent text; it has no role in this dish. Ignore it.
- YieldSix eggs and the sauce serve three as a lunch or supper course, or six as part of a larger breakfast.
Fannie Merritt Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book (first published 1896) set out to bring level measurements and reproducible method to American home cooking, and its egg chapter is full of restaurant-style presentations scaled down for a household cook without a brigade. Sauce bearnaise itself is generally traced to the kitchen of the Pavillon Henri IV at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in the 1830s, the name a nod to Henry IV, the Bearnais; by Farmer's day it had crossed into English and American cookbooks as a marker of French polish. What is telling is how she builds it: olive oil and hot water in place of the butter, a double boiler in place of judgement over direct flame, and quantities given to the fraction of a tablespoon. It is French ambition rendered in the idiom of a cooking school, aimed at a reader who had never worked a saucier's station and was not expected to.