Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Eggs Fried in Batter
Eggs Fried in Batter
Poach six or eight eggs in water, not allowing them to get hard. Place on a folded napkin to drain and cool. Put one pound of fat into a fryingpan, and when it is hot, fry some parsley with it. Dip each egg singly with a large spoon in batter, sprinkle with finely-chopped parsley, and fry until brown in the fat. Put the fried parsley on a dish, arrange the eggs on it, squeeze over some lemon juice, and serve.
A short recipe that assumes a great deal: Oscar's kitchen staff knew what "batter" meant and had a pot of fat always at temperature. Two things decide whether this works — how firm the poached eggs are before they go into the batter, and how dry the parsley is before it goes into the fat.
- Poach firm enough to handlePoach until the whites are fully set but the yolks still soft, about 3 minutes. The recipe drains and cools them on a folded napkin; getting them cold and firm first helps, since a cold egg holds its shape under a spoonful of batter better than a warm one.
- Trim the ragged edgesOnce cooled, pare off the wispy tails of white with scissors or a knife so each egg is a neat oval. This is the step that separates a kitchen version from a home one, and it costs a minute.
- The batter is unspecifiedOscar assumed a standing frying batter. A plain one of 1 cup flour, 1 egg, and about 3/4 cup milk or beer, beaten smooth and rested, coats well. It should ribbon thickly off the spoon; thin batter slides off a wet egg.
- One pound of fatAbout two cups of lard or a similar solid fat — enough depth to float the eggs in a small deep pan. Any neutral frying oil does the same work. Bring it to 350–375°F.
- Fried parsley spattersParsley must be washed and then dried thoroughly, or the water in it will erupt in hot fat. Fry small sprigs 10 to 20 seconds only, until they stop bubbling and turn brilliant green; brown parsley is bitter. Lift out and drain before the eggs go in.
- Fry briefly"Until brown" is about 1 to 2 minutes. The egg is already cooked; you are only setting the crust. Longer and the yolk hardens, which defeats the point of the dish.
- Do them one at a timeDip and lower each egg individually, as written, and fry no more than two at once. Crowding drops the fat temperature and the coatings stick together.
- Yield and servingSix to eight eggs serve three or four as a first course or a luncheon dish. Serve immediately with the lemon; the crust softens within a few minutes.
Deep-fried poached eggs belong to the era when a hotel kitchen kept a fat kettle hot all day and treated the egg as a thing to be dressed rather than merely cooked. The technique of coating an already-poached egg in batter appears in nineteenth-century French and Anglo-French cookery well before this book of 1896, usually as a light entrée platter. The fried parsley bed is a period signature: it turns up under fried whitebait, sweetbreads and croquettes throughout Victorian and Edwardian menus, valued for its sharp green color and audible crispness at a time when a plate was expected to look composed. Oscar was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf rather than its chef, and much here is left unsaid — the standing batter, the state of the fat.