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Egg and Anchovy Toast
Remove the shell from four cold hard boiled eggs and chop them; put a saucepan over the fire with one ounce of butter, one teaspoonful of cornmeal blended smooth in a little milk, one teaspoonful each of anchovy sauce and vinegar, a seasoning of pepper and salt, and one pint of milk; stir over the fire until boiling, and then put in the chopped eggs, stirring them well in. Toast three rounds of bread, butter and spread the mixture over, and serve hot.
A savoury supper dish of creamed egg on toast, thickened with cornmeal rather than flour. The proportions as printed give a sauce far looser than most cooks will expect, which is the thing to plan around.
- The sauce will be thinOne teaspoonful of cornmeal cannot thicken a pint of milk; expect something closer to a pourable cream than a spreadable mixture. Either reduce the milk to about a cup, or raise the cornmeal to two or three tablespoons, and let it simmer a few minutes so the meal loses its raw grit.
- "Over the fire"Medium heat on a burner. Once it boils, hold it at a bare simmer and stir constantly — and cornmeal catches on the bottom of a pan faster than flour does.
- Anchovy sauceA thin bottled condiment of the period, essentially anchovy essence with vinegar and spice. Anchovy paste thinned with a little water, or two or three fillets mashed to a pulp, stands in for the teaspoonful; the vinegar in the recipe is already accounting for the sharpness.
- Add the eggs off the heatThey are already cooked. Stir them in once the sauce has come together and warm them through only — prolonged boiling turns hard-boiled white rubbery and squeaks against the teeth.
- Salt lastAnchovy sauce is aggressively salty and quantities vary between brands. Season the sauce after the anchovy has gone in, not before.
- The toast"Three rounds" means three slices, cut round if you are being formal about it. Toast them dry and butter them hot so they stay firm under a wet topping; assemble at the last moment or the bread collapses.
- YieldThree slices, enough for two people as a light supper or three as a first course. Four eggs to three slices makes for a generous heap.
Anchovy in some form — essence, paste, bottled sauce — was a workhorse savoury seasoning of the nineteenth-century English and Anglo-American kitchen, the thing that gave depth to a white sauce before commercial stock cubes and long before bottled umami was described as such. Dishes of this kind belong to the tradition of the hot "savoury," a small sharp course served late in a meal or at breakfast and supper, and they turn up in hotel and club cookery of the period. Oscar Tschirky, maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria, compiled his 1896 Cook Book as a working reference of well over nine hundred pages, made up largely of short entries like this one.