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Eggs, Marquise
Cut away the tender parts of bunch green, fresh asparagus, place them in a saucepan with a quart boiling water, half teaspoon each salt and sugar, and boil for twenty-five minutes. Drain, then press through sieve into a saucepan, adding half ounce butter and two table spoons cream. Season with two saltspoons salt, three saltspoons sugar, half saltspoon grated nutmeg, and briskly stir on the fire while heating for two minutes. Spread on a hot dish, arrange twelve poached eggs on top, pour a gill hot demi-glace over and serve. NASI GORENG PONTIANAK (DRY CURRY) Have on a dish one hashed onion, one bean crushed garlic, one finely chopped green pepper, one ounce finely chopped, cooked ham, two ripe, seedless, chopped tomatoes, one teaspoon curry powder, two small crushed cloves, one bay leaf and a sprig of thyme.
Cut two pounds raw lean beef into three-quarter-inch-square pieces, heat two tablespoons melted butter in a saucepan, add the beef and fry for ten minutes, then add all the above articles. Season with a teaspoon salt, a half teaspoon pepper, a saltspoon grated nutmeg, and gently brown for ten minutes, occasionally stirring meanwhile. Moisten with a quart hot broth or water, mix lightly and boil for fifteen minutes, then add four ounces raw rice and mix well. Cover the pan set in oven for thirty-five minutes, remove, dress on a dish, remove the bay leaf and thyme, sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
Two recipes run together here — an asparagus purée under poached eggs, and a beef-and-rice dish filed as "dry curry." The measurements belong to a professional kitchen of the 1900s and need translating before either will work.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so the egg dish takes about 1/2 teaspoon salt, 3/4 teaspoon sugar and a scant 1/8 teaspoon nutmeg. A gill is half a cup — that is 4 oz of demi-glace over twelve eggs, a sauce accent rather than a pool.
- Twenty-five minutes of asparagusThat is far past modern practice for spears, but this is a purée and the tips are meant to collapse. Tender asparagus will be soft in 10-12 minutes; boil only until it yields to a sieve, since past that point the green goes grey and the flavour flattens.
- Press through a sieveA food mill or blender does the same work in seconds, but still pass the result through a sieve afterwards. Asparagus fibre is stringy and no blender fully defeats it.
- Demi-glaceIn 1906 this meant a reduced brown sauce built on veal stock and espagnole, a standing item in a restaurant kitchen. A good reduced veal or beef stock, thickened lightly and finished with butter, is the honest substitute; commercial demi-glace concentrate works if diluted less than the package says.
- Poaching twelve eggsPoach them ahead into cold water, trim the ragged whites, and reheat for 30 seconds in hot salted water just before serving. Trying to poach a dozen to order onto a purée that is cooling is how the dish fails.
- YieldTwelve eggs on one bunch of asparagus serves six as a lunch or supper course, two eggs each.
- The nasi goreng that followsThe second recipe is a separate dish that has been run into the same paragraph — a braise of beef with rice baked in the oven, closer to a pilaf than to Indonesian nasi goreng, which is fried rice made from rice already cooked. The period name reflects a loose colonial usage rather than the dish as it is understood now.
- Rice ratio in the second recipeFour ounces of raw rice is roughly a half to two-thirds of a cup, going into a quart of liquid that has already boiled fifteen minutes with the beef. Judge by the pan when it comes out of the oven — "a bean" of garlic appears to mean a bean-sized piece, probably rather less than a whole clove.
- Oven for the braiseNo temperature is given. A covered pan of rice and stock wants a moderate oven, 350F, for the thirty-five minutes specified.
Both entries come from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, the work of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and they show the two halves of that book's ambition. "Marquise" is one of the ornamental French garnish names that ran through American hotel menus of the period — such titles were generally attached to a signature element rather than to a fixed formula, and here it marks the asparagus purée beneath the eggs. The green bed with poached eggs and a spoonful of brown sauce is the classic restaurant logic of the era: a vegetable purée doing the work of a plate, a rich reduction doing the work of seasoning. The Pontianak dish beside it belongs to the book's other project, the sweep through "the world's kitchen," where recipes gathered second-hand from ports and colonies often arrived with a place name attached and the technique quietly reworked into something a French-trained brigade could execute.