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Poached Eggs with Bechamel Sauce
Pour one pint of bechamel sauce into a saucepan, and set it on the hot stove; cut twelve hard-boiled eggs in halves, and put them into the hot bechamel sauce; season with white pepper, and warm up thoroughly for three minutes, but without boiling; add one ounce of butter and one saltspoonful of grated nutmeg; pour the whole onto a hot dish, and serve with six croutons of fried bread.
A simple chafing-dish preparation from the Waldorf's kitchen: hard eggs warmed through in a well-made bechamel. The whole thing stands or falls on the sauce, and on not letting it boil.
- The title contradicts the methodDespite the name, no egg is poached here — the recipe calls for twelve hard-boiled eggs halved. Follow the instructions, not the heading.
- Do not let it boilThe recipe is explicit: warm through without boiling. The eggs are already cooked, and a hard boil will toughen the whites. Keep the pan at a bare shiver, three minutes, just to heat through.
- A pint of bechamelTwo cups. A white roux of butter and flour let down with milk (period versions sometimes used veal stock), cooked out until it no longer tastes of raw flour. Have it hot before the eggs go in or the eggs will sit too long over heat.
- SaltspoonfulA quarter teaspoon. That is a generous amount of nutmeg for two cups of sauce, which is characteristic of the period — grate it fresh and add it off the heat if you want less of it.
- The finishing butterAn ounce is 2 tablespoons, swirled in at the end away from the heat. It is there for gloss and body, not flavour, and it will separate if the sauce is too hot.
- Croutons of fried breadNot the diced kind. Shaped pieces of bread fried crisp and set around the edge of the dish — the recipe calls for six, one per serving.
- YieldTwelve eggs and six croutons: six servings as a luncheon or supper dish, two eggs (four halves) plus sauce apiece.
- SeasoningWhite pepper is specified so the sauce stays unspeckled. The recipe never mentions salt; the bechamel should already carry it, so taste before serving.
Bechamel is one of the French mother sauces, generally traced to the kitchens of Louis XIV's court and named for Louis de Bechameil, a financier and household steward there — the attribution is traditional rather than documented, and the sauce almost certainly predates him. By the time Oscar Tschirky was running the dining rooms of the Waldorf in the 1890s, a good bechamel was the workhorse of the American hotel kitchen: it turned cheap staples into something that could be sent out on a hot silver dish. Eggs in cream sauce belonged to the light end of the menu, the sort of thing ordered at luncheon or after the theatre, and it survives in American home cooking as creamed eggs on toast.5 The croutons here do the same job the toast does, with more polish.}