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Eggs a La Suisse
4 Eggs 1/2 Cup Cream 1 Tablespoon Butter or Butter Substitute 3 Tablespoons Grated Cheese Salt Pepper Cayenne Heat a small omelet pan, put in butter, and when melted, add cream. Slip in the eggs one at a time, sprinkle with salt, pepper, and a few grains of cayenne.
When whites are nearly firm, sprinkle with cheese. Finish cooking, and serve. (Good with rice.)
A shirred-egg dish cooked entirely on the stovetop in cream. It moves fast, so have the cheese grated and the seasoning at hand before the butter goes in.
- The hingeKeep the heat low enough that the cream never boils hard. Held at a bare tremble it thickens around the eggs into a sauce; pushed to a rolling simmer it can separate and the whites toughen.
- Pan sizeA "small omelet pan" is probably something on the order of 8 inches, just large enough to hold four eggs in one layer without crowding. In a larger pan the half cup of cream spreads thin and evaporates before the eggs set.
- CreamUse heavy cream. Half-and-half and modern light cream have less fat to hold them together over direct heat and are more likely to curdle.
- Butter substituteIn a book of this vintage that means margarine or a vegetable shortening. Butter is better here; the quantity is small and it is part of the flavor.
- CheeseGruyere or Emmental is what "a la Suisse" implies, and 3 tablespoons grated is roughly half an ounce. Aged Gruyere melts smoothly; pre-shredded cheese with anti-caking starch will go grainy in the cream.
- DonenessTotal cooking time is about 5 to 7 minutes. The whites should be just set and the yolks still liquid; cover the pan for the last minute if the tops are lagging behind the bottoms.
- Cayenne"A few grains" is a pinch, well under an eighth of a teaspoon. It is there for warmth against the cream, not heat you can identify.
- YieldTwo servings as written, or four if the rice mentioned at the end is doing real work as a base. Serve straight from the pan with the cream spooned over.
Dishes labeled a la Suisse in early twentieth-century American cookbooks generally mean cheese, usually the firm Alpine cheeses sold here as Swiss. The method itself belongs to the family of shirred and creamed eggs that filled the breakfast and supper chapters of the period. A closely similar recipe appears in Fannie Farmer's Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, and compilations of this kind were commonly drawn from the standard household manuals of the day. The closing note, "good with rice," may serve as much to stretch four eggs to feed a table as to suggest an accompaniment.