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Poached Eggs with Mushrooms
Have a quarter of a pound of mushrooms peeled, washed and drained, put them into a saucepan with a tablespoonful of butter, season with salt and white pepper, and squeeze in two or three drops of lemon juice. Cover over the pan and cook for ten minutes over a moderate fire; add about a quarter of a wineglassful of Madeira wine, and reduce to half the original quantity; add one gill of bechamel sauce and bring the whole to a boiling point. Poach twelve eggs. Pour the sauce on a hot dish, keeping the mushrooms in the saucepan, lay the eggs neatly over the sauce in a circle on a dish and place the mushrooms in the center.
A garnish-and-egg dish from the Waldorf's breakfast and supper repertoire, built on three separate operations that have to land at the same moment. The sauce is the part to prepare first; the eggs go in last and wait for nothing.
- A gill of bechamelA gill is half a cup, 4 fluid ounces. Have the bechamel made and hot before the mushrooms go on, since it only needs to come back to a boil in the pan.
- A quarter of a wineglassfulA wineglass in period American cookbooks is reckoned at about 2 fluid ounces, so this is roughly a tablespoon of Madeira. Use a dry or medium-dry Sercial or Verdelho, not the salted cooking Madeira sold in supermarkets.
- Peeling mushroomsPeriod cookbooks routinely direct that mushrooms be peeled. Modern white or cremini buttons need nothing more than a wipe; peeling costs you flavor and a good deal of the cap.
- A moderate fireMedium on a burner. The mushrooms are meant to sweat under the lid and give up their liquid rather than brown, which is why the pan is covered.
- Reduce to halfThis applies to the mushroom liquor plus the Madeira, not to the finished sauce. Take that combined liquid down by half before the bechamel goes in, or the sauce will be thin and taste raw of wine.
- Poaching twelve eggsBarely simmering water with a splash of vinegar, three or four minutes for a set white and a liquid yolk. Poach them in batches and hold them in warm water, then drain each on a cloth before it goes on the dish, or the sauce will be watered down.
- YieldTwelve eggs and a quarter pound of mushrooms serve six as a lunch or supper course, two eggs each. The proportions scale down cleanly by half.
- AssemblyEverything must be hot at once: warm the serving dish, sauce it, ring the eggs around the edge and pile the drained mushrooms in the middle. The dish cools fast and does not reheat.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893, and his 1896 Cook Book is essentially a working record of a large hotel kitchen organized in the French manner, which is why a simple plate of poached eggs arrives with a bechamel, a Madeira reduction and a mushroom garnish arranged in a ring. Eggs treated this way belong to the enormous family of hotel egg dishes that filled American breakfast, luncheon and after-theater supper menus in the period, each distinguished chiefly by its sauce and garnish rather than by any change in technique. Madeira held a particular place in that repertoire, and a spoonful of it reduced into a pan gave a sweetness and depth that sherry or white wine would not. The instruction to peel the mushrooms suggests a time before the smooth, thin-skinned commercial button had become standard.