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Eggs, Archebald
Cut out from a sandwich loaf six quarter-inch-thick slices, then with a pastry cutter cut out each slice in two-inch pieces, lightly butter them and toast to a nice golden colour, place on a dish. Have two quarts boiling water with a tablespoon salt and two tablespoons vinegar on the fire, crack in six fresh eggs, boil them for three minutes, lift up with a skimmer, neatly trim, arrange them on the six toasts. Cut three Spanish red peppers in two, then fry in a frying pan with a teaspoon butter for one and a half minutes on each side, then arrange a piece on top of each egg. Finely slice six canned mushrooms, place in a small saucepan with two canned artichoke bottoms cut in small squares, pour in two tablespoons sherry, cook for five minutes, then pour in gill tomato sauce with teaspoon freshly chopped parsley, boil for five minutes, pour the sauce over the eggs and serve.
A composed poached-egg dish in the Delmonico's manner: toast rounds, eggs, a pepper garnish and a small sherried ragout of mushroom and artichoke. Everything but the eggs can be held warm, so build the garnish first and poach last.
- The hinge: three minutes, not moreThe recipe calls for a full boil, though six eggs added at once will pull two quarts of water back somewhat; modern practice favours a bare shiver rather than a rolling boil, which shreds the whites. Three minutes should give a set white and a liquid yolk; pull them the moment the white is opaque.
- Salt and vinegarA tablespoon of salt and two of vinegar in two quarts is close to usual modern proportions and should not flavour the eggs noticeably. The vinegar helps the whites coagulate; skip it only if you are using very fresh eggs whose whites still hold together.
- "Neatly trim"Lift each egg onto a slotted spoon or paper towel and cut away the ragged skirt of white with a knife or the same pastry cutter used for the bread. This is the step that makes the plate look professional and it takes seconds.
- A gillHalf a cup. Two tablespoons of sherry plus half a cup of tomato sauce dresses six eggs lightly; the sauce is a napping, not a pool.
- Spanish red peppersFleshy sweet peppers, sold now as jarred or canned pimientos or piquillos, already skinned and mild. If you use fresh red bell pepper instead, roast and peel it first — a minute and a half per side in butter will not soften raw pepper skin.
- Canned mushrooms and artichoke bottomsBoth were commercially available when the book was written and both are still sold; artichoke bottoms come canned in brine, or substitute drained quartered artichoke hearts. Rinse canned mushrooms to lose the tinny liquor before slicing.
- Bread and cutter"Sandwich loaf" means a fine-crumbed white pan loaf. Cut the six quarter-inch slices, stamp two-inch rounds, butter and toast under the broiler or in a dry pan; a toaster will not give you the even gold on a buttered round.
- YieldSix eggs, so six as a first course or three as a light lunch. The whole assembly takes about twenty minutes if the garnish goes on the heat before the poaching water.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), and it belongs to a very large family of egg dishes named after individuals — patrons, colleagues, public figures — that flourished in the restaurant kitchens of late nineteenth-century New York and Paris. Filippini spent many years at Delmonico's, where a cook working through dozens of variations on the poached egg needed names to keep them apart, and a regular customer's surname is one likely source; who Archebald was is not recorded in the book, and such attributions are usually impossible to trace. The recipe also shows what a well-stocked kitchen could buy by 1906: canned mushrooms, canned artichoke bottoms and preserved Spanish peppers, commercially packed goods that were far less widely available a generation earlier. Sherry, tomato sauce and a fried pimiento cap on top place it in the loosely "Spanish" idiom that ran through American hotel menus of the period.