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Poached Eggs with Celery Sauce
Boil two heads of well-washed celery in one quart of white broth for fifteen minutes. Take them out, cut in one-inch lengths, return to the pan with the broth leaving it on the stove to keep hot, and season with salt and white pepper. Reduce the liquor to three-quarters (which will require about ten minutes) pour in one gill of hot bechamel sauce, and boil again. Poach twelve eggs and arrange them neatly around a hot dish, pour the sauce in the center, and serve quickly.
A simple supper dish that depends entirely on two things: a stock with enough body to reduce well, and eggs poached soft. Everything else is assembly.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. If you are working from a British source it is 5 fl oz, but Oscar was cooking in New York and the American gill is meant here.
- White brothAn unbrowned stock — veal, chicken, or the two together, made from bones and aromatics that were never roasted. A good unsalted chicken stock stands in. Avoid anything dark or heavily reduced; the point is a pale sauce.
- Two heads of celeryA head is the whole bunch, not a rib. Two bunches is a large quantity for a quart of broth; trim the coarse outer stalks and the leaf tops, and use the tender inner ribs and hearts.
- Fifteen minutes is for old celeryCelery of this period was often trench-blanched and likely coarser than what is sold now; modern supermarket celery is generally tender in six to eight minutes of simmering. Cook it until a knife goes through without resistance, then stop.
- Reduce the liquor to three-quartersReduce the quart of broth down by a quarter, to about three cups. Ten minutes at a hard boil is optimistic for that volume; expect longer, and take the celery out first so it does not turn to string.
- BechamelA classic white sauce — butter and flour cooked without colour, milk whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon. Half a cup thickens the reduced broth into something that will sit on the plate rather than run off it.
- Poaching twelve eggsWater at a bare tremble, not a boil, with a splash of vinegar. Two and a half to three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk. Poach ahead into cold water and reheat for thirty seconds in hot water if you are doing all twelve.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper course, two apiece around the rim of a warmed platter with the celery and sauce pooled in the middle.
Oscar Tschirky ran the dining rooms of the Waldorf, and his 1896 book records the kind of cooking that hotel kitchens turned out by the hundred plate — French method applied to whatever was in the market. Celery was the market ingredient here: American celery in the 1890s was a prestige vegetable, grown in trenches and blanched pale, sold in tall glasses on the table at good restaurants and eaten raw as an appetiser. Cooking it in stock and binding the result with bechamel is straightforward French practice. Poached eggs with a vegetable sauce belonged to the lighter end of the menu, the sort of thing served at luncheon or as a supper dish after the theatre.