Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Eggs and Cream
Eggs and Cream
Put one pint of cream into a saucepan and boil it until it is reduced to half a pint. Beat up ten eggs and mix them with the cream and season with salt and pepper. Stir the mixture over the fire until the eggs are curdled; then turn it out onto a hot dish, put a small quantity of grated nutmeg on the top, brown under a salamander, and serve.
A rich scramble built on reduced cream, from the era when the Waldorf kitchen ran on brigade equipment. Two words in the text do most of the work: curdled and salamander.
- "Curdled" is not a warningIn period usage it means the point where the eggs set into soft curds, not a broken, weeping mixture. Pull the pan the moment the mass holds together and still looks glossy; carryover heat in that much reduced cream will finish it on the plate.
- The salamanderA restaurant overhead broiler, used here only to glaze the surface. A domestic broiler on high with the dish 4-5 inches beneath does the same job in under a minute. Watch it continuously; the nutmeg scorches before the eggs colour.
- Use a flameproof serving dishThe eggs go from pan to "hot dish" and then straight under the heat, so the dish must take a broiler. A shallow gratin dish, warmed first, is right; a thin platter is not.
- Reducing the creamOne pint down to half a pint takes roughly 10-20 minutes depending on the width of the pan. Use heavy cream rather than half-and-half, which has too little fat to reduce to the same body. Let it cool slightly before the eggs go in so they do not seize on contact.
- Heat control"Over the fire" simply means on the stove. Use low heat and stir constantly with a spatula, scraping the base; ten eggs in reduced cream will tighten fast over anything higher.
- NutmegGrate it fresh over the surface just before browning. Pre-ground nutmeg loses its aroma quickly and gives much less under direct heat.
- YieldTen eggs and half a pint of cream serves six as a course on its own, or eight to ten alongside other breakfast dishes. It is very rich; the original assumed a hotel breakfast table, not a single plate.
Oscar Tschirky presided over the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book collects the plain working formulas behind a very grand operation alongside its showpieces. This is one of the plain ones: a hotel breakfast egg dish that depends entirely on the quality of the cream and the cook's judgement about when to stop stirring. The proportion of ten eggs to a reduced half-pint of cream marks it as service food for a table of guests rather than a family recipe, and the finishing pass under the salamander — in its older form a heated iron plate held over the dish — gives the surface the light glaze that distinguished a hotel plate from a home one. Nutmeg with eggs and cream is an old pairing in English and French cookery, carried into American hotel kitchens.