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Catherine Eggs
Wash well and bake some large potatoes in the oven; when done, remove, cut a piece off the tops and take out sufficient of the insides to contain one raw egg to each potato. Break in the egg and season with salt and pepper, then cover with a spoonful of cream sauce for each one. Place them on a pan in the oven for fifteen minutes, then take out and serve with any kind of brown sauce poured around.
A baked potato used as a ramekin for a shirred egg, finished with two sauces. The whole thing hinges on the egg, which needs to set without the yolk hardening or the white weeping.
- Baking the potatoesLarge russets at 400F for about an hour, until a skewer slides through easily. Oscar gives no temperature; a well-baked shell is what holds the egg.
- Hollowing outLeave at least a quarter inch of flesh all round, or the shell collapses when the egg goes in. Take out a little more than an egg's worth of potato so the cream sauce has somewhere to sit.
- Cream sauceIn this book that means a white sauce -- butter and flour cooked together, thinned with milk or cream and seasoned. A spoonful per potato, no more, or it floods the well and the egg poaches rather than sets.
- Brown sauceProbably an espagnole or demi-glace in the original kitchen. The recipe itself says only "any kind of brown sauce." A good reduced beef or veal stock sauce works; a thin gravy will taste watery against the cream.
- The fifteen minutesAt 375F that is about right for a set white and a soft yolk, but check at ten. The potato is already hot and carries the egg along faster than you expect, and a hard yolk in a potato shell is a dull thing.
- Season under and overSalt and pepper on the exposed potato flesh as well as on the egg. The scooped interior is unseasoned and will taste flat otherwise.
- YieldOne potato per person as a light lunch or supper dish, two as a main. It does not hold -- serve as soon as the sauce goes round.
Oscar Tschirky was never actually a chef at the Waldorf; he was the maitre d'hotel, and his 1896 Cook Book gathers up the hotel's working repertoire, including page after page of egg dishes distinguished only by their garnish and their name. Naming a preparation after a woman -- Catherine, Yvette, Suzette -- was common in French restaurant kitchens of the period, and the person behind the name is very often unrecoverable. The technique here is classic shirred egg cookery, borrowed into a potato shell, and it belongs to a moment when hotel kitchens were expected to produce dozens of individually plated, individually sauced egg dishes for a lunch service. The double sauce -- white inside, brown around -- is characteristic late-nineteenth-century restaurant practice.