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Surprise Eggs
Break the required number of eggs into a pan of boiling water to poach, but without cooking them hard; take them out to put in a basin with a squeeze of lemon juice, finely-chopped parsley and salt, and steep for several hours; take them out again, drain, put them in batter, then into some breadcrumbs, and fry one or two at a time in boiling fat until done to a light brown. Arrange some sprigs of parsley on a dish, place the eggs on the parsley, and serve.
A soft-poached egg, marinated, breaded and deep-fried — the ancestor of the modern crumbed egg. Two things decide whether it works: how firmly you poach, and how cold the eggs are when they meet the batter.
- Poach short, chill fast"Without cooking them hard" means about 2 1/2 to 3 minutes in barely simmering water, so the white is set and the yolk still liquid. Lift straight into ice water to stop the cooking, then drain on a cloth.
- Steep in the refrigeratorThe recipe leaves the eggs sitting for several hours with lemon, parsley and salt, and says nothing about temperature. Do the steeping covered in the refrigerator; a lightly cooked egg held for hours at room temperature is exactly the condition Salmonella likes.
- Dry before batteringStraight out of the marinade the whites are slick and the coating slides. Blot them well, dust with flour, then batter and crumb, or the shell will split in the fat and lose the yolk.
- "Boiling fat"Nineteenth-century shorthand for deep fat at frying heat, not fat literally at a boil. Use 350-375F and give each egg about a minute, until light brown — long enough to set the crust and keep the yolk running.
- One or two at a timeThis is not fussiness. A soft egg chills the fat and needs turning gently with a spider; crowding the pan guarantees a broken one.
- The batterThe recipe does not say what batter. A plain frying batter of flour, egg and enough milk or water to coat the back of a spoon suits the job; the modern sequence of flour, beaten egg, then fine dry crumbs works as well and is easier to handle.
- The parsley bedThe recipe says only to arrange sprigs on the dish and set the eggs on them. Fried parsley was a common garnish of the period and crisps in the same fat in a few seconds, if you would rather not have raw sprigs wilting under a hot egg.
- YieldCount one to two eggs per person as a first course or luncheon dish; they must be served the minute they leave the fat.
Oscar Tschirky was maître d'hôtel of the Waldorf at a moment when the American hotel kitchen was working almost entirely in the French idiom, and this belongs to a family of dishes in which a poached egg is treated as though it were a croquette: cooled until firm enough to handle, crumbed and fried while the yolk stays liquid inside. Egg cookery of this kind filled out the luncheon and supper cards of grand hotels, where an inexpensive ingredient could be dressed up with technique, and Oscar's book is full of such preparations — eggs done a dozen ways, each with a name that promises rather more than eggs.