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Eggs and Beet-Root Salad
Take some cooked beet-roots, peel, slice and put in a pan with a few tablespoonfuls of olive oil and toss them about over a brisk fire until hot. In another pan poach some new-laid eggs and trim them. Pile the slices of beet-root in the center of a hot dish, garnish around with the eggs, dredge them lightly with pepper, squeeze the juice of a lemon over, and serve at once. This makes a very good breakfast dish, and takes but little time to prepare.
A warm composed salad rather than a cold one, and it stands or falls on the eggs: they should be soft-poached so the yolk runs into the beet juice and oil, which is the sauce. Everything else takes ten minutes.
- Cooked beet-rootsBoiled or roasted beets, peeled once cool enough to handle. Vacuum-packed cooked beets work; avoid anything pickled in vinegar, which fights the lemon.
- "A brisk fire"Medium-high heat. You want the slices hot through and lightly glazed in the oil, not browned or collapsing, so two or three minutes of tossing is enough.
- New-laid eggsNot a flourish. Fresh eggs have tight whites that hold a compact shape in the poaching water; older ones spread into rags. Add a splash of vinegar to the poaching water if yours are not especially fresh.
- Trim themLift each poached egg with a slotted spoon and cut away the wispy skirt of set white with scissors or a knife, so the eggs sit as neat ovals around the beets. Drain them on a cloth or paper first or they will weep water onto the dish.
- SeasoningOscar dredges with pepper only. Salt the beets while they are in the oil and salt the eggs at the table; the dish is flat without it.
- Yolk temperaturePoach three minutes for a fully liquid yolk. Standard food-safety advice is that soft yolks are best avoided by pregnant women, young children and anyone immunocompromised, who should use pasteurised eggs.
- Assembly and timingHave the plate hot and everything ready before the eggs go in the water. Poached eggs held even a minute or two firm up and the beets cool fast on the plate.
- YieldFigure two eggs and roughly one medium beet per person; the recipe as written scales to whatever the pan will hold.
Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf's maitre d'hotel, published his cook book in 1896 as a compendium of hotel cooking rather than a record of dishes he personally invented, and this is a good example of the genre: a European breakfast idea, plainly described, that a household cook could copy. Beetroot with oil and lemon is old and widespread across the continent. The name "salad" here reflects older usage, in which a salad meant something dressed with oil and acid, warm or cold, rather than something built on raw leaves. Beets kept well and were a common winter vegetable in American kitchens of the period, which may be why the recipe can assume them already cooked and take pride in how little time it needs.