Home › The Waldorf Kitchen › Turban of Eggs
Turban of Eggs
Stew a pound of fresh mushrooms, then cut them up very fine; stir them into a glassful of bechamel sauce, adding the yolks of six raw eggs. Pour this preparation into a buttered border-mould, and poach it for a quarter of an hour in a double steamer. Unmould and dress the border into a dish, and on top arrange six soft eggs, with a fine cockscomb between each one; cover with Spanish sauce.
A ring of mushroom custard with soft-boiled eggs on top — straightforward once the period shorthand is decoded. The hinge is heat: this is a custard, and if the water under it boils hard the ring will curdle and weep.
- A glassfulPeriod glass measures are not standardised; depending on the vessel intended this could be anywhere from a wineglass (about 2 fl oz) to a tumbler (about 8 fl oz). Something in the region of half a cup of thick bechamel against six yolks and a pound of cooked mushrooms gives a mixture stiff enough to hold a mould.
- Border-mouldA plain or fluted ring mould. Butter it heavily and, if you want insurance, line the bottom with a disc of buttered paper.
- Double steamerMost likely a bain-marie rather than a steamer basket over rolling water: set the mould in a pan of water held at a bare shiver, around 170-180F. (The recipe calls for no oven, but a covered water bath in a moderate oven will do the same job.) Fifteen minutes, as given, suits a shallow ring; a deeper one will take longer. It is done when the centre resists light pressure and a skewer comes out clean.
- Stew a pound of mushroomsCook them in butter until they have thrown off their liquid and that liquid has boiled away. Wet mushrooms will loosen the custard and it will not unmould.
- Soft eggsOeufs mollets — shelled soft-boiled eggs, not poached. Six minutes in boiling water for a large egg, then straight into cold water so they peel, then a moment in warm salted water to bring them back up before serving.
- CockscombsBlanched, peeled and simmered cockscombs were a standard garnish in grand French service and are effectively unobtainable now. Substitute a glazed mushroom cap, a slice of truffle or nothing at all; they were decorative rather than structural.
- Spanish sauceSauce espagnole: the brown mother sauce, veal or beef stock thickened with brown roux and enriched with tomato and mirepoix. A well-reduced demi-glace does the same job with less work.
- YieldSix eggs, six servings, as a first course or a light lunch dish. Both the custard ring and the sauce want to be finished and served at once — a reheated egg custard turns granular.
The turban is a shape rather than a dish: French service used the word for anything built as a ring, from the coiled fish of a turban de sole to a moulded forcemeat border, and the name is generally traced to the resemblance to a wound headdress. Oscar Tschirky's kitchen at the Waldorf worked squarely in the Escoffier-era idiom, where a composed egg course of this kind — a savoury custard border, eggs set in it, a brown sauce poured over — was standard mid-menu fare, and the recipe is written in the compressed telegraphic style of a professional who assumed his reader already had bechamel and espagnole standing on the stove. The cockscomb garnish places it in a long tradition rather than fixing a date: cocks' combs and kidneys were a prized offal trimming in nineteenth-century French cooking, listed among the classic garnishes, and they seem to have receded from restaurant kitchens along with the rest of the ornamental butchery, a decline often associated with the decades after the First World War.