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Eggs, Romeo
Broil four thin slices lean raw ham two minutes on each side, remove, and chop exceedingly fine. Heat in a small saucepan one tablespoon butter, add two tablespoons flour, and mix well while heating half minute. Pour in half gill milk, one gill cream, season with a saltspoon salt, a saltspoon cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply mix until it comes to a boil, add ham, with a half tablespoon grated Swiss cheese, mix a little, then let boil for five minutes and keep hot. Cut from a sandwich loaf twelve pieces, quarter-inch thick and two inches in diameter, toast them to a good golden colour, spread a very little anchovy butter on top of each, and arrange on a tin. Prepare twelve poached eggs and lay over the toast, spread the sauce over each egg evenly, dredge a little Parmesan cheese over all, set in oven three minutes, remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A hotel-style egg dish: poached eggs on toast rounds under a thick ham-and-cheese béchamel, glazed briefly in the oven. Nothing here is difficult, but the seasoning and the sauce thickness both need adjusting to modern taste.
- The measuresA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup and one gill of cream is 1/2 cup. A saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon.
- CayenneA full 1/4 teaspoon of cayenne in three-quarters of a cup of sauce is aggressive by current standards, and the strength of period cayenne cannot be assumed to match a modern jar. Start with a pinch and taste.
- Sauce consistencyTwo tablespoons flour to 3/4 cup liquid gives a very stiff sauce, deliberately so — it has to sit on a poached egg without running off. Boiling it five minutes cooks out the raw flour; stir constantly and thin with a spoonful of milk if it goes past spreadable.
- The cheeseHalf a tablespoon of grated Swiss for twelve eggs is barely detectable. A quarter cup is closer to what the dish wants; add it off the heat at the end so it does not go stringy.
- Anchovy butterNot a shop item now. Mash two or three oil-packed anchovy fillets into four tablespoons softened butter. "A very little" is right — it is a salt accent under the egg, not a layer.
- Oven for the glazeThe recipe gives no temperature, only 'set in oven three minutes'; the purpose is purely to colour the Parmesan, so the oven needs to be hot. Longer and the poached yolks set hard, which defeats the dish. A broiler for one to two minutes, watched, does the same job.
- Poaching aheadTwelve eggs are awkward to poach to order for a single service. Poach them slightly soft, slide into cold water, then reheat thirty seconds in hot salted water and drain on a towel before assembling -- the usual way of handling quantities of poached eggs.
- YieldTwelve rounds, so six servings of two as a first course, or four as a light lunch.
The International Cook Book is Alexander Filippini's, and Filippini was long associated with the Delmonico's kitchens in New York, where the habit of naming a garnish or an egg preparation after a person, a place or a character was well established. Dishes called Rossini, Bénédictine, Meyerbeer and the like fill the egg chapters of turn-of-the-century books; the name usually records the particular combination of toast base, sauce and garnish rather than any story about its supposed namesake, and "Romeo" here means simply poached eggs on anchovy toast under a ham-and-Swiss sauce. The whole construction — round of toast, poached egg, coating sauce, cheese, flash of oven heat — is the standard grammar of the period's egg cookery, endlessly recombined; eggs Benedict, whose printed record generally traces to New York in the same era, is built on exactly the same frame.