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Two Brother Eggs
Line six tartlet moulds with puff paste, having had six turns and rolled out very thin; cook the tartlets in the oven and keep them warm. Beat five eggs with a handful of grated Parmesan cheese, seasoning with salt, pepper, and a little grated nutmeg. Scramble these eggs, keeping them quite soft, and fill the tartlets two-thirds high with them; in each one lay a poached egg, and stew chopped parsley over. Dress them onto a folded napkin, and serve at once. Eggs, Valencienne Style Put one breakfast cupful of hot, boiled rice into a saucepan with half a pint of hot tomato sauce, two mushrooms, one truffle cut into small pieces, and two tablespoonfuls of grated Parmesan cheese; season with salt and grated nutmeg, and cook over a hot fire for five minutes, stirring lightly with a wooden spoon. Remove the pan to the side of the stove to keep warm; put half an ounce of butter into a dish and set it on the hot stove to melt; break in eight fresh eggs, being careful not to injure the yolks, season with salt and pepper, and cook for two minutes. Arrange the rice mixture in four dome-shaped heaps, one at each end of the dish, and one at each side, place the eggs in the center, and serve immediately.
Two hotel egg dishes printed one after the other, both of which depend entirely on undercooking. Everything else is assembly.
- The hinge: soft on softThe scrambled eggs go into the tartlets barely set, still glossy, because they keep cooking in the warm pastry before they reach the table. Firm scramble plus a poached egg on top gives you two dry eggs instead of two soft ones.
- "Six turns" of puff pasteSix folds is the standard full lamination for classic pâte feuilletée. All-butter frozen puff pastry, rolled thinner than it comes, does the job; you want the shells crisp enough to hold a wet filling.
- Blind-baking the shellsLine 2½ to 3 inch tartlet moulds, dock the base, weight it, and bake at 400–425°F until dry and browned. The book itself gives no oven temperature.
- "Stew chopped parsley over"A printer's slip for strew. Scatter the parsley on top.
- A handful of ParmesanRead it as about ¼ cup grated for five eggs. Parmesan is salty, so season the eggs lightly and taste before adding more.
- "Dress them onto a folded napkin"Standard nineteenth-century service for anything fried or pastry-based: the linen absorbs butter and keeps the tartlets from sliding on the silver. A warmed plate does the same work now.
- Breakfast cupfulA breakfast cup is generally taken as somewhere around 8 fluid ounces, so roughly one cup of cooked rice to a half pint (1 cup) of tomato sauce. The rice mixture should be moist enough to mound but not soupy.
- Truffle and "the side of the stove"One truffle is not a realistic purchase; a teaspoon of truffle paste, or simply more mushroom, keeps the dish honest. "The side of the stove" is the cooler edge of a coal range — the lowest burner setting, or a warm oven.
- The eggs in the Valencienne dishEight eggs broken into half an ounce of butter and cooked two minutes will leave the whites loose in spots. Cook them until the whites are opaque and set throughout, which on a modern burner takes longer than two minutes, and cover the pan or slide it into a 350°F oven to set the tops without hardening the yolks.
- YieldThe tartlets serve six as a first course or three at breakfast; the rice-and-egg dish is written for four.
Oscar Tschirky ran the Waldorf's dining rooms from 1893 and published his Cook Book in 1896, a transcription of the hotel's working repertoire running to roughly nine hundred pages rather than a book of home cookery — which is why so much of it assumes a coal range with hot and cool zones, a pastry cook down the hall, and truffles in the larder. Both dishes belong to the enormous egg chapter that hotel kitchens of the period maintained for breakfast and light supper service, where a cook needed dozens of named variations on the same handful of eggs. "Valencienne" is the standard French menu tag for a garnish built on rice, generally traced to the rice-growing country around Valencia, and on menus that used French terms it often had little to do with Spain.<br><br>The one thing worth noticing is how little either dish depends on the eggs themselves: the interest is in the pastry, the cheese, and the mounded rice. Egg cookery in a hotel was a canvas for garnish.