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Andalusian Eggs
Poach six very fresh eggs, pare them neatly and dress them in a circle on a Duchess potato border browned in the oven. Cover the whole with American sauce to which has been added a little finely-chopped green pepper and strew the surface with a little chopped tarragon. Serve while quite hot with more of the sauce apart.
A plated composition rather than a recipe with quantities: the work is in the two components Oscar assumes you already have on hand. Read it as an assembly instruction and make the potato and the sauce first.
- American sauceSauce américaine, whose name is disputed and has nothing to do with American cooking: shellfish shells (classically lobster) sweated in oil with onion, flamed with brandy, moistened with white wine, fish stock and tomato, then strained and finished with butter. There is no substitute that behaves the same way; a plain tomato sauce will read as a different dish entirely.
- Duchess potato borderDry riced potato beaten with butter and egg yolk, piped through a large star tube into a ring on a buttered ovenproof dish and browned. Pipe it firmly and high enough to hold sauce. The recipe specifies no temperature; a hot oven (around 425F) for a few minutes, or briefly under the broiler, will colour it without the long baking that dries it out.
- Pare them neatlyPoached eggs are trimmed, not peeled. Lift each egg out, let it drain, and cut away the ragged veil of white with a knife or the rim of a cutter so the six sit as even ovals. Poaching in advance and holding them in warm water is standard practice; they go onto the potato at the last moment.
- Very fresh eggsThe instruction is technical, not sentimental. Fresh whites are thick and cling to the yolk, giving a compact egg; older whites spread into threads and there will be little left after paring.
- Green pepper and tarragonThe recipe says only that the chopped pepper goes into the sauce; adding it raw at the last moment keeps it bright and slightly crisp. Tarragon is strewn on after saucing, as directed; it turns dull and hay-like if it sits in hot liquid.
- TimingEverything is hot and nothing waits. Have the browned potato ring, the finished sauce and the drained eggs ready simultaneously, sauce over the eggs, herb on top, to the table. Reheated poached eggs firm up and the sauce skins over.
- YieldSix eggs will serve three as a lunch or supper dish, or six as a first course. The extra sauce goes to the table separately, as directed.
Nineteenth-century French kitchen nomenclature attached "andalouse" to garnishes involving sweet peppers and tomato, the two ingredients Europeans associated with southern Spain, and that is the logic here: the pepper in the sauce and the tomato-red shellfish base do the naming. Oscar Tschirky, who ran the Waldorf dining rooms from 1893, was not a cook by trade but a steward and host with a formidable memory for what the kitchen sent out, and this entry appears to have been written for a brigade that would likely have had duchess potato mixture and a shellfish sauce standing in the larder, so the recipe records only the assembly. Egg dishes of this kind, set on a piped potato border and masked with a rich sauce, seem to have been familiar on the American hotel luncheon card in the years around 1900, when a composed egg plate would have made a respectable middle course between soup and a roast.