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Eggs, Turinoise
Cut twelve hard-boiled eggs in quarter-inch slices. Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with two and a half tablespoons flour, heat a half minute, pour in two gills hot milk, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons cayenne and a saltspoon grated nutmeg. Sharply mix with wooden spoon until it comes to a boil, then add two tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese and mix well for one minute. Broil twelve thin slices bacon for two minutes on each side, then cut in half-inch pieces and add to sauce with eggs. Mix well, pour into a baking dish, sprinkle a very little Parmesan cheese over, divide half an ounce butter in very little bits on top, set in oven for ten minutes remove and serve.
A hard-boiled egg gratin in a thick, cheese-sharpened béchamel. The measurements are pre-standard but all convert cleanly, and the only real trap is the cayenne.
- Two gills of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is one cup of hot milk against 2½ tablespoons of flour. That is a thick binding sauce by design, not a pouring sauce — it has to hold twelve sliced eggs together in the dish.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of cayenne is a half teaspoon, which is genuinely fierce in a single cup of sauce; a quarter teaspoon reads as seasoned rather than hot. The nutmeg at a quarter teaspoon is right as written.
- A teaspoon of saltThat is a lot of salt for one cup of sauce when the bacon and the Parmesan are both bringing their own. Salt the sauce lightly and correct at the end, after the bacon goes in.
- No oven temperatureThe recipe just says "set in oven." The dish goes in already hot and needs only ten minutes, which implies a hot oven; somewhere around 400F is a reasonable modern reading, long enough to brown the cheese and butter without curdling the sauce or toughening the egg whites.
- Cooking the rouxHalf a minute over heat is barely enough to lose the raw-flour taste. Two to three minutes at a gentle bubble, without colouring, gives a cleaner sauce and the same thickening power.
- The baconTwo minutes a side under a broiler leaves it cooked but limp, which is what the dish wants — crisp bacon goes soft and leathery once it sits in sauce and returns to the oven. Drain it before cutting.
- Handling the eggsQuarter-inch slices break easily. Fold them in off the heat with a spatula rather than the wooden spoon called for earlier, and expect some yolks to crumble and thicken the sauce further.
- YieldTwelve eggs and twelve rashers serve six as a lunch or supper dish with bread, or eight or so as part of a larger meal. It does not reheat well; the sauce tightens and the whites turn rubbery.
"Turinoise" is restaurant French for "in the style of Turin," one of a long series of place-name garnishes that Continental kitchens attached to dishes to signal a defining ingredient — here, presumably, the grated hard cheese. The recipe comes from The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the book's ambition was exactly what its title suggests: to set French, Italian, German, Creole and American dishes side by side in one household volume.