No. 2944

Scrambled Eggs with Swiss and Parmesan Cheese

Œufs Brouilles au Fromage de Gruyere et au Parmesan

Beat eight eggs lightly in a bowl, pour them into a saucepan having its bottom buttered with two ounces of fresh butter; season and thicken on a slow fire while beating unceasingly, and as soon as cooked incorporate an ounce of butter and two of grated parmesan. Remove it from the fire and then pour in a little good veloute sauce (No. 415) and raw cream; finish with a few spoonfuls of Swiss cheese cut in dice and softened in cold milk. Dress the preparation in a deep dish and surround with puff-paste crescents. Scrambled eggs may be prepared with the Swiss cheese or with grated parmesan, mixing in three ounces of either. Surround with triangle-shaped bread croutons fried in butter (No. 51).

← No. 2943 Scrambled Eggs with Sweetbreads Eggs & Omelets No. 2945 Scrambled Eggs with Tomato Puree →

For the Modern Kitchen

Ranhofer's scrambled eggs are the French kind: cooked slowly, beaten constantly, and finished loose enough to spoon. The whole recipe hinges on heat control, not on ingredients.

The hinge: low heat, no rest"Thicken on a slow fire while beating unceasingly" is the entire technique. Keep the pan barely warm and stir without stopping; eight eggs this way will take considerably longer than ordinary scrambled eggs, and the moment you walk away you have curds instead of cream.
Pull them early"As soon as cooked" means still visibly loose, because the cold butter, cream and velouté that follow are there partly to arrest the cooking. Eggs that look finished in the pan will be dry in the dish.
Butter quantitiesTwo ounces (4 tablespoons) to coat the pan bottom is generous by any standard; an ounce is plenty, with the second ounce beaten in at the end as the recipe directs. Ranhofer's kitchen was cooking for Delmonico's, not for calorie counting.
Velouté No. 415The cross-reference is to a classic velouté, a white roux loosened with veal or chicken stock. A few spoonfuls of any good unsalted chicken velouté or a thick béchamel will do the same job of enriching without thinning.
"Raw cream"This simply means cream that has not been cooked or scalded, added off the heat. Heavy cream is the modern equivalent; a couple of tablespoons is enough.
The Swiss cheeseGruyère, diced small and "softened in cold milk", which is usually explained as keeping the cheese from tightening when it meets the hot eggs. Soak the dice in just enough cold milk to cover, drain, and fold in at the very end.
Season lastParmesan and Gruyère are both salty, and the velouté may be as well. Season the raw eggs lightly and correct only after the cheeses are in.
Puff-paste crescents and croûtonsThe crescents are fleurons: puff pastry cut with a round cutter, egg-washed, and baked in a hot oven until risen and browned; the recipe itself gives no temperature. Frozen all-butter puff pastry is a fair substitute. The alternate garnish is bread triangles fried in butter.
YieldEight eggs with this much enrichment serves four as a first course, or two or three at a substantial breakfast.

A Little History

Charles Ranhofer spent more than thirty years as chef at Delmonico's in New York, and The Epicurean (1894) is essentially that restaurant's working repertoire set down in print, complete with the internal cross-references to sauce and garnish numbers that a professional brigade would have used. The dish itself is a straightforward exercise in French egg cookery, where scrambled eggs were understood as a slow-cooked, saucelike preparation rather than the brisk high-heat American version; the double cheese is the point of interest, pairing grated Parmesan for savor with diced Gruyère for the pull of melted strands. Soaking the Gruyère in cold milk before adding it is an old professional habit, generally explained as a way to keep the cheese from tightening into rubber when it hits the hot eggs. The puff-paste crescents, called fleurons, are the sort of detail that marks the recipe as restaurant work: a garnish whose function is largely to signal that the kitchen had a pastry section.