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Eggs with Cheese and Parsley
Grate four ounces of Parmesan cheese and chop fine a few sprigs of parsley; melt two ounces of butter in a stewpan, put in the parsley and fry for a few minutes; then add the cheese and two wineglassfuls of white wine and stir over the fire with a wooden spoon until the cheese is melted. Break in one egg, stir it well, then add another egg and so on until eight have been used. Turn the mixture out onto a hot dish, garnish with croutons of fried bread, and serve.
This is a stirred egg-and-cheese custard in the Brillat-Savarin mould, not a baked dish or an omelette. Everything depends on keeping the pan below a simmer once the eggs go in.
- The hinge: low heat, one egg at a timeThe eggs are added singly so each sets into the hot cheese without scrambling. Keep the pan over the lowest possible flame, or move it on and off the heat; if the mixture ever bubbles you will get curds in a greasy pool rather than a thick cream.
- WineglassfulA wineglass in period American cookbooks is about 2 fl oz, so two is roughly 1/2 cup of white wine. The recipe calls for no reduction; if the mixture seems thin, some of the wine can be allowed to cook away with the cheese before the eggs go in.
- ParmesanFour ounces grated is roughly a cup and a half, depending on how finely it is grated. Buy a wedge and grate it yourself; pre-grated cheese usually carries an anti-caking starch or cellulose that can make the sauce grainy.
- Frying the parsley"Fry for a few minutes" means softening it in the butter, not browning. Parsley scorches quickly in two ounces of butter over anything but gentle heat.
- SaltNone is called for, and with four ounces of Parmesan none is usually needed. Taste before serving and add pepper if you want it.
- CroutonsSmall dice of white bread fried in butter until crisp. Make them before you start the eggs, since the mixture will not wait.
- Yield and timingEight eggs and four ounces of cheese serves four as a lunch or supper dish. Expect several minutes of steady stirring once the cheese has melted, and serve straight from the pan onto a warmed dish, as it stiffens and weeps as it cools.
Oscar Tschirky, the Swiss-born maitre d'hotel whose name carried the Waldorf's 1896 cookbook, filled it with dishes from the European repertoire of the New York dining rooms where he came up, and this one belongs to a family of egg-and-cheese preparations found across the Alpine belt — Piedmontese fonduta, Swiss cheese-and-egg messes, and the "fondue" of Brillat-Savarin's Physiologie du gout (1825), which is likewise eggs beaten into grated cheese and butter rather than the bread-dipping pot the word later came to mean. The white wine and Parmesan point south rather than to Gruyere, and fried bread was a common garnish of the period for giving a soft dish some texture and making a modest quantity of eggs fill a platter. A dish like this would suit supper and after-theatre service: quick to fire, cheap in materials, and impossible to hold.