Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Egg Aurora
Egg Aurora
Boil one dozen eggs until hard, take off their shells, cut them in halves, remove the yolks and run them through a fine sieve; put four ounces of butter in a saucepan with one breakfast cupful of cream, one teaspoonful of flour, a little grated nutmeg, salt and pepper, and set it on the fire; simmer gently without boiling until thick, then throw in the whites of half the eggs, previously chopped fine, and stir well. Put the remainder of the whites on a dish, pour over the mixture, put a little butter on this, and melt it with a salamander. When the butter is quite melted, serve, taking care to keep it very hot.
A hot stuffed-egg dish in cream sauce, finished under direct heat. The recipe is written for a cook who already knows the house's conventions, so a few of its steps need filling in.
- The sieved yolksThe instructions never say what becomes of the twelve sieved yolks. Nothing in the text accounts for them, so reserve them and either sprinkle them over the finished dish or fold part into the sauce for body.
- SalamanderA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated red and held over food to brown or melt the surface. A broiler set high, for a minute or two, does the same work; the point is heat from above only, so the sauce browns without the eggs stewing.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup — reckon it at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. One cup of cream is a safe reading.
- Butter and flour proportionsFour ounces is one stick. A single teaspoon of flour against a cup of cream and that much butter will not make a thick sauce in the modern sense; it thickens by reduction, which is why the instruction is to simmer gently until thick rather than to cook out a roux.
- Do not let it boilThis is the hinge. A cream-and-butter sauce carried to a boil will break and go greasy, and there is not enough flour here to hold it together. Keep it just below a simmer and stir.
- Hard-boiling the eggsThe recipe gives no time. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives firm yolks without the grey ring; prolonged hard boiling produces a sulphurous edge.
- AssemblySix egg whites are chopped into the sauce; the other six are left in halves as the base. The recipe says only to put them on a dish; arrange the halves cut side up in something shallow that will take direct heat, so they hold the sauce.
- Yield and servingA dozen eggs feeds six as a first course or a lunch dish. It must go to the table straight from the heat — the sauce stiffens and the eggs turn rubbery as they cool.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf from its opening in 1893 and then the Waldorf-Astoria on its completion in 1897, and his 1896 cook book collects the hotel's working repertoire alongside a great deal of borrowed French practice. The egg chapter is long because eggs were the backbone of hotel breakfast and supper cards, where a kitchen needed dishes it could build from staples at any hour. "Aurora" in French cookery normally signals a rosy tint, most often from tomato; here there is no tomato, and the name appears instead to come from the golden sieved yolk strewn over the white sauce, a name applied to what the dish actually had on hand. The salamander it calls for was standard equipment in any professional kitchen of the period.