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Fried Eggs for Garnish
Pour half a teacupful of sweet oil into a fryingpan; when hot, break in one egg carefully, closing up the white part with a skimmer so as to have it firm and compact, and cook for two minutes. Only one egg at a time should be in the pan.
This is the French oeuf frit — an egg basted in a shallow pool of hot oil until the white is crisp-edged and compact — not the flat, gently cooked American fried egg. A few notes on the vocabulary and the technique.
- Sweet oil"Sweet oil" is olive oil, sold under that name well into the twentieth century to distinguish edible oil from lamp or machine oil. A mild, non-virgin olive oil behaves best at this heat; a peppery extra virgin turns bitter.
- Half a teacupfulA period teacup is reckoned anywhere from 4 to 6 fluid ounces, so half is somewhere around a quarter to a third of a cup: enough to film the bottom of a small pan generously, not enough to deep-fry.
- Oil temperature is the hingeThe oil must be hot enough to seize the white on contact; the recipe says only "when hot". Cooler oil lets the white spread into lace and the egg will never close up into the neat oval a garnish needs.
- Closing up the whiteA skimmer is a flat perforated spoon; any slotted spoon or spider does the job. Use it to fold the loose outer white back over the yolk and hold it there briefly, then baste hot oil over the top.
- One at a time, and whyTwo eggs in the pan drop the oil temperature and their whites merge, which ruins the shape. The instruction is about appearance, not caution.
- Two minutesTwo minutes at proper heat gives a set, lightly browned white and a still-liquid yolk. If the eggs are for a garnish that will sit on a hot dish, pull them at ninety seconds; they carry on cooking.
- Egg freshnessFresh eggs have a thick, tight white that holds a compact shape. Older supermarket eggs have thinned whites that scatter in hot oil — worth knowing if the shape is the whole point.
- Yield and useOne egg per portion. Drain on paper, trim any ragged edge with a knife or round cutter, and set it on top of hash, spinach, a rice pilaf or a tomato-sauced dish just before it goes out.
Oscar Tschirky was maitre d'hotel of the Waldorf and later the Waldorf-Astoria from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working reference for a large brigade kitchen — which is why a page like this exists at all. A fried egg here is not breakfast but a component, one of the standard finishing touches kept ready to drop onto hash, hominy, spinach or a Spanish-style rice. The oil-fried egg belongs to the Mediterranean tradition rather than the buttered griddle. The offhand direction to use "sweet oil" by the teacupful is a reminder that olive oil in an 1890s hotel was a bulk frying medium, not the finishing condiment it has since become.