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Eggs with Kidneys
Break into a buttered dish twelve fresh eggs, or if desired, use six small dishes, breaking two eggs into each one; then cook them on the stove for two minutes. Cut into halves six mutton kidneys and broil, or stew them according to taste; then add them to the eggs, and serve with half a pint of hot perigueux.
A hotel breakfast dish written in shorthand for cooks who already knew what it looked like: shirred eggs, broiled lamb kidneys, truffle sauce. The gaps in the instructions are the whole difficulty.
- The sauce is the workPérigueux is a demi-glace finished with Madeira and chopped truffle. Oscar assumes a stockpot of espagnole already reduced and waiting; without it, plan on making or buying a good veal demi-glace before you start, since the eggs take minutes and the sauce takes hours.
- "Cook them on the stove"This means eggs in shallow buttered dishes set over direct low heat, the classic oeufs sur le plat. Two minutes only begins to set the bottoms; expect five to eight minutes over low heat until the whites are opaque and the yolks still loose. The recipe specifies the stove, not the oven.
- Mutton kidneysThese came from adult sheep and were larger and stronger in flavour than what a modern butcher sells; lamb kidneys are the usual substitute. Peel off the membrane, halve lengthwise, and cut out the pale fatty core at the hinge; skipping this leaves a chewy centre.
- Broiling timeHalved lamb kidneys need about 3-4 minutes a side under a hot broiler and should stay faintly pink. Cooked through to grey they turn dense and take on a strong ammoniac edge, which is what gives kidneys their bad reputation.
- Half a pintOne cup of sauce for twelve eggs, spooned around rather than over, so the yolks stay visible. Have it hot but not boiling when the eggs come off the heat.
- YieldTwelve eggs and six kidneys serve six as written, two eggs and two kidney halves each. The six small dishes are the better option: individual gratin dishes or shallow ramekins about five inches across.
- SaltNo seasoning is specified in the recipe; the sauce would have carried much of it. Salt the whites lightly as they set and taste the sauce before serving; a reduced modern demi-glace can be very salty on its own.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published this collection in 1896, when kidneys at breakfast were still common in establishments aspiring to English gentility -- devilled kidneys, kidneys on toast, kidneys with eggs. The sauce takes its name from P ation -- P u00e9rigueux in the P u00e9rigord, the region whose black truffles gave French cookery its default truffle sauce: a brown demi-glace with Madeira and chopped truffle, distinguished from sauce P u00e9rigourdine by the treatment of the truffle and, conventionally, by the addition of foie gras. That a hotel could list it as an offhand finish for a plate of eggs says a good deal about both the price of truffles in the 1890s and the size of the brigade standing behind the range.