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Bacon and Eggs
Thoroughly heat half a teaspoon melted butter in a small frying pan. Carefully crack two fresh eggs on a saucer without breaking the yolks, then slide them into the pan. Season with just a very little salt and pepper, and fry on a slow fire for three minutes. Slide them on a hot dish. Proceed with five other portions in exactly the same way. Lay over the eggs in each dish one slice of bacon and serve very hot.
A restaurant method written for a cook plating six covers at once, which explains the odd instruction to repeat everything five more times rather than crowd one large pan.
- The hinge: one pan, two eggsThe whole point is that each portion is fried alone in a barely greased pan so the whites stay compact and the yolks unbroken. Cooking twelve eggs together on a griddle gives a different, flatter dish.
- "Slow fire"Low heat, roughly medium-low on a modern burner, with the butter hot but not coloured. Three minutes at that heat sets the white and leaves the yolk liquid; if the butter browns before the eggs go in, the pan is too hot.
- Half a teaspoon of butterThat is genuinely all, in the small pan the recipe calls for. These are not basted or spooned eggs; the fat only keeps them from sticking. A nonstick or well-seasoned iron pan makes this workable.
- Cracking onto a saucerNot fussiness. It lets you spot a broken yolk or a bad egg before it reaches the pan, and it lets the eggs slide in flat rather than dropping and spreading.
- The bacon is not cooked hereThe recipe gives no instruction for it at all, only 'one slice of bacon' laid over the eggs, so it must come ready-cooked from elsewhere. Cook the bacon first, in a separate pan, and keep it warm; the eggs take three minutes and will not wait.
- Soft yolksThree minutes over low heat leaves the yolk runny, which is what the recipe intends. For anyone pregnant, very young, elderly or immunocompromised, use pasteurized eggs or cook until the yolk is firm.
- Yield and platingSix portions of two eggs each, plated on individual hot dishes rather than a platter. Warm the plates; unheated china pulls the heat out of two eggs almost immediately.
Fried eggs with bacon needs no origin story, but its appearance in a book called The International Cook Book does. Bacon and eggs was a dish English and American travellers commonly expected at breakfast abroad, and hotels catering to them would have had to produce it to order, a portion at a time. That may be why a recipe this elementary is written with such procedural care: the instructions read as though aimed at a kitchen turning out six identical plates rather than at a home cook feeding a family. The book belongs to the years before the First World War, when Escoffier's brigade system was reshaping European hotel kitchens.