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Poached Eggs with Wine Sauce
Pour into a stewpan one pint of claret with two sprigs of parsley and a sprig of thyme tied together; also a small onion, one clove of garlic, one clove, salt and pepper to taste; boil for a quarter of an hour; strain through a fine hair sieve and return it to the stewpan. Break in carefully one egg and leave it in one minute, then take it out with a skimmer and place it on a dish; proceed in this manner until eight eggs have been used, then put the dish in a warm place. Work one tablespoonful of flour with a quarter of a pound of butter, put it into the wine sauce, stir over the fire and boil until reduced to a thick cream. Pour the sauce over the eggs, and serve. Eggs, Poulette Style Boil a gill of milk with a little chopped parsley, a small lump of butter, and a pinch of pepper and salt; add six hard-boiled eggs peeled and cut into slices, also a few button mushrooms. When the eggs are hot, arrange on a dish, thicken the sauce with arrowroot, pour it over, and serve. Eggs, Queen Style Boil eight eggs gently in a saucepan for five minutes; take them, strip off the shells and plunge into cold water. Put the meat of a cooked fowl in a mortar and pound it well, adding one tablespoonful of butter, two tablespoonfuls of bechamel sauce, a little grated nutmeg, and salt and pepper to taste. When well mixed, rub this through a sieve into a saucepan, warm it, and if too thick, add a little cream. Put it on a dish, place the eggs in a circle with a small piece of tongue or truffle between them, and garnish the dish with croutons of fried bread. A rice border may be used with the puree piled in the center, and garnished with the eggs.
Three egg dishes run together on one page; the first is the substantial one, essentially the Burgundian oeufs en meurette under a Waldorf name. A few of Oscar's proportions and timings need adjusting.
- ClaretNineteenth-century American menus used "claret" for red Bordeaux. Any dry, moderately tannic red works, but avoid anything oaky or jammy — the wine is reduced hard and its faults concentrate. One pint is two cups.
- The one-minute poachA minute leaves the white barely veiled and the egg impossible to lift intact. Poach 3 to 4 minutes in wine held just below a simmer for a set white and liquid yolk. Very fresh eggs hold their shape far better; a splash of vinegar in the wine is unnecessary and would fight the sauce.
- Poach the eggs before the reductionAs written the wine is reduced to a thick cream only after the eggs come out, which means the eggs sit and cool. Poach them, hold them in warm water rather than on a dry dish, then finish the sauce and drain each egg on a towel before saucing.
- The butter and flourA quarter pound of butter to one tablespoon of flour is a beurre mani at roughly eight parts fat to one of flour by volume, where equal parts is the norm, and it will break if boiled hard. Reduce the strained wine to about half a cup first, then whisk the paste in off the heat in small pieces and bring it back only to a bare simmer.
- Hair sieveA fine-mesh strainer. Line it with a doubled square of cheesecloth if you want the sauce glossy rather than flecked.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a first course, or two as a supper with bread. The other two dishes on the page serve three to four each.
- Poulette styleA gill is half a cup. Raw button mushrooms will not cook through in the minute the sliced eggs need to warm; saute them in the butter first. Arrowroot thickens instantly and thins again if boiled, so add it slurried in cold milk and take the pan off the heat as it comes together.
- Queen styleFive minutes gives a soft yolk and a white that tears when shelled. For eggs firm enough to stand in a circle, cook 9 to 10 minutes, then the cold-water plunge as directed. The pounded fowl and bechamel is a sieved poultry puree; a food processor does the work of the mortar, and the sieving is still worth doing.
Poaching eggs in red wine rather than water is a Burgundian habit \ette, a wine-and-butter reduction — and it likely reached American hotel dining rooms through the French kitchen brigades that ran them. Oscar Tschirky, who was maitre d'hotel at the Waldorf from 1893, was compiling not his own inventions so much as the working repertoire of a large hotel kitchen, which is why the page reads as a list: an egg station needed a dozen named preparations it could produce on order, and the names did the work of distinguishing them. "Poulette" and "a la Reine" are standard French sauce and garnish designations rather than anything specific to the Waldorf — poulette for the pale butter-and-parsley cream, reine for a puree of poultry — and their appearance here shows how thoroughly classical French nomenclature, codified well before Escoffier's Guide Culinaire, had been absorbed into American hotel cooking by 1896.