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Poached Eggs with Anchovy Sauce
Put eight eggs into a saucepan of water and boil for five minutes; then take them out, remove the shells and put them in cold water. Cut off the crust from a stale loaf and cut the crumb into slices about one inch in thickness, and again into oval-shaped pieces about the size of eggs. Cut them transversely around the edge with a sharp knife, put them in a fryingpan of boiling fat and fry them to a light brown. Take them out, split across, removing the bottom part, scoop out a little of the soft inside, fill each cavity with an egg, and put on the tops. Flavor a little bechamel sauce with essence of anchovies, place the egg croustades on a dish, pour the sauce over them, and serve very hot.
An Edwardian savory of soft-boiled eggs served in fried bread cases under anchovy-spiked bechamel. The title says poached but the method is boiled; the real difficulty is getting the shells off cleanly.
- The hinge: peeling the eggsFive minutes gives a set white and a still-soft yolk, which is the point, but such eggs tear easily. Note that the recipe peels first and cools afterwards; it is easier to cool them hard in cold water first, then crack and peel under running water. Older eggs release the shell more readily than very fresh ones.
- "Poached" means boiled herePeriod cookbook titles are often loose about which method produced the soft egg. If you would rather actually poach them, do it in advance and hold them in cold water, then warm briefly in hot water before filling the cases.
- Essence of anchoviesA commercial bottled anchovy extract, thin and salty, now uncommon though still made. Anchovy paste from a tube is the closest easily found thing: start with half a teaspoon per cup of bechamel and taste, since the sauce should carry a savory edge, not read as fish.
- Bechamel quantityOscar assumes you have sauce standing by. About a cup and a half of medium bechamel is enough to coat eight croustades. Salt it lightly before adding the anchovy, which is salt itself.
- Frying the croustadesFat at 360-375F. Below that the bread drinks oil; above it browns before the inside dries out. "Cut them transversely around the edge" appears to mean scoring a shallow ring around the case so it separates cleanly after frying, which is what the later "split across" implies.
- Stale bread mattersA day-or-two-old firm white loaf holds its shape and absorbs less fat. Fresh crumb collapses when you scoop the cavity, and soft supermarket sandwich bread will not work at all.
- TimingFry the cases first and keep them warm; peel and fill the eggs at the last moment and sauce them at the table's edge. Held any length of time, the cases soften and the yolks continue to set.
- YieldEight croustades: four as a light lunch or first course, eight as the small savory course this was written for.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf dining rooms during the fashion for the savoury — a small, salty, often anchovy-flavored dish served late in a long menu, a habit borrowed from English dining and enthusiastically adopted by New York hotels in the 1890s. Anchovy "essence" was a pantry staple of the period, bottled alongside mushroom ketchup and Harvey's sauce, and cooks reached for it much as a modern kitchen reaches for fish sauce. The fried bread croustade is the same economy that produced canapes and croutes: yesterday's loaf, cut and fried, becomes an edible vessel that needs no dishwashing. In hotel cookery, eggs and a standing pot of bechamel could be turned into a dozen differently named plates.