Home › Eggs › Scrambled Eggs with Anchovy Toast
Scrambled Eggs with Anchovy Toast
Spread thin slices of buttered toast with anchovy paste. Arrange on platter, and cover with scrambled eggs.
An assembly rather than a method — the book assumes you already know its scrambled egg recipe and treats this as a variation. Two things decide whether it works: the softness of the eggs and how heavily you lay on the anchovy.
- The scrambled eggs it assumesFarmer's base method is eggs beaten slightly with about a tablespoon of milk or cream each, cooked in butter and stirred constantly until creamy; the instruction to keep the heat low is a modern gloss rather than hers. Pull them while still glossy and loose; they carry on cooking on the hot toast.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes, and much saltier than it looks. A scant half teaspoon per slice is plenty under eggs, and the eggs themselves should be salted lightly or not at all.
- Butter first, paste secondThe butter is not incidental. It keeps the paste from soaking into the toast and blunts the salt. Spread while the toast is warm, then the paste over it.
- Toast thicknessThe book says only "thin slices" and gives no measurement; a slice from a firm white sandwich loaf keeps the ratio right, while thick artisan slices bury the anchovy.
- Anchovy fillets insteadIf you have no paste, mash two or three oil-packed fillets to a smooth paste with an equal volume of soft butter and use that as the spread.
- YieldFigure two eggs and one slice of toast per person; four eggs and two slices serve two as a breakfast or light supper dish.
- ServingAssemble at the last minute. Toast spread and left standing goes limp, and scrambled eggs held warm turn watery on the plate.
Anchovy in one form or another was a fixture of the Anglo-American breakfast and savoury table through the nineteenth century — anchovy paste, anchovy essence and Gentleman's Relish all sold in small pots as a ready-made hit of salt and umami. Fannie Farmer's 1896 book gives a run of these one-line variations in the egg chapter, each a small permutation on a method taught earlier in the section, which is how the Boston Cooking School worked: learn the technique once, then apply it. The pairing of soft eggs with a salty fish spread on toast belongs to the same family as the English savoury course.