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Spanish Eggs
Put into a saucepan one breakfast cupful of washed rice with a quart of boiling milk; add half a tablespoonful of salt and boil until done; strain the rice, drain on a colander, and put into a basin; add two ounces of butter, mix well, and spread evenly on a dish. Cut into slices six hard-boiled eggs, arrange on the rice, and serve.
A plain milk-boiled rice with sliced hard eggs over it. Nothing here is difficult, but two details in the original will trip up a cook working from it literally.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is larger than a teacup, generally reckoned at 8 to 10 fluid ounces. Take it as one standard cup of raw rice, which with a quart of milk gives a ratio of roughly 4:1 liquid to grain.
- Milk scorchesA quart of milk on a rice pot will catch on the bottom long before the grain is done. Use a heavy pan, keep it at a bare simmer, and stir often; a double boiler is closer to what a hotel range with its cool back corners allowed.
- The saltHalf a tablespoonful for a cup of rice is heavy by modern taste, though much of it will leave with the drained milk. If you intend to serve the rice unstrained, start with a teaspoon.
- Straining after boilingOscar drains the rice and discards the milk, which is why the dish reads dry rather than creamy. If you would rather have it absorb the liquid, use about two cups of milk to one of rice and skip the colander entirely.
- The butterTwo ounces is four tablespoons, folded through the hot drained rice. Do it while the grain is still steaming or it will sit in streaks rather than coating.
- Hard-boiled eggsSix eggs for a cup of raw rice is generous. Cook them just until the yolk is set through, around ten minutes off the boil, and cool them promptly; the grey-green ring comes from overcooking and will show badly against white rice.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a light supper or luncheon dish. It is bland by design and wants seasoning at the table -- paprika, pepper, or a tomato sauce alongside, which many later dishes under this name include.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel at the Waldorf, not a chef, and the 1896 book that carries his name gathers recipes from the hotel's kitchens along with a good deal of standard nineteenth-century American cookery. "Spanish" in menu language of the period was elastic: it usually signalled rice, tomato, pimiento or paprika, and sometimes little more than the presence of rice at all. This version has no tomato and no pepper, so the name rests on the rice alone — a reminder that hotel menu French and menu Spanish were often decorative rather than descriptive. The underlying dish, rice boiled soft in milk and dressed with butter and sliced egg, belongs to the large family of egg-and-starch supper dishes that filled out luncheon cards and Lenten menus when a meatless course was wanted.