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Luncheon Cheese and Eggs
Put one-half pint of cream into a "spider" and let heat to the boiling point, then break in, carefully, six eggs. When they are set, the same as poached eggs, put them on a hot platter. Add to the cream left in the spider two tablespoons of grated cheese and season, then pour over the eggs.
A one-pan dish of eggs poached in cream rather than water, finished with the cream as sauce. The whole thing hinges on keeping the cream below a hard boil once the eggs go in.
- What a "spider" isOriginally a long-handled frying pan on three short legs, made to stand over coals; by the early twentieth century the word was commonly used for a heavy cast-iron skillet. Any wide, shallow pan will do, ideally 9 or 10 inches so six eggs sit in one layer.
- One-half pint of creamThat is 1 cup. Heavy or whipping cream gives the sauce body; anything lighter than about 30% fat is more likely to break or curdle as it reduces around the eggs.
- Heat, not boilHeat, then ease off -- The original says to bring the cream to the boiling point; take it back to a tremble before the eggs go in. Held at a rolling boil the whites toughen, the cream separates, and the milk solids scorch on the pan bottom.
- "When they are set"About 3 to 4 minutes for whites firm and yolks still liquid; 5 to 6 minutes for yolks set through. There is less thermal cushion than in water, so check early.
- The cheeseTwo tablespoons of grated cheese is a light touch by modern taste. The recipe does not name a variety; a dry aged cheese such as a firm cheddar suits it. Stir it into the cream off the heat so it melts without stringing.
- SeasoningThe original does not specify. Salt, white or cayenne pepper, and a scrape of nutmeg or a few drops of Worcestershire are all plausible for a cream-and-cheese sauce of this kind.
- YieldSix eggs serves three at lunch, two if it is the main dish. Serve on buttered toast or in the hollow of a split baked potato to catch the sauce, and warm the platter as directed, since the cream thickens and dulls quickly on a cold plate.
Cheese and egg dishes filled a specific slot in the early twentieth-century household: luncheon, the lighter midday meal served without a joint of meat. Butterick was a pattern company publishing for the same middle-class women who bought its dress patterns. The technique here, poaching eggs directly in cream instead of acidulated water, belongs to a family of English and American "eggs in cream" recipes that use the poaching liquid as sauce and so waste nothing. The word spider is the real period marker: the legged hearth pan it named is generally said to have been fading from use by this period, but the name clung to the flat cast-iron skillet that replaced it, and stayed in American kitchen speech for decades after the object was gone.