Home › The World's Kitchen › Eggs, Van Winkle
Eggs, Van Winkle
Cut in half and finely slice a medium white onion, place in small saucepan with one ounce butter and fry to a nice golden colour; add one ounce flour, stir well, then pour in one and a half gills milk and a half gill cream, add half teaspoon chopped chives, mix well and let boil for fifteen minutes. Cut twelve hard-boiled eggs in quarters, add them to the sauce, season with a teaspoon salt, two saltspoons each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and boil for five minutes. Transfer the eggs into a baking dish, sprinkle over a tablespoon fresh bread crumbs, arrange a few little bits of butter on top, then set in oven for ten minutes. Remove sprinkle a half teaspoon finely chopped truffles over them and serve.
A creamed hard-boiled egg gratin, thickened with a small roux and finished under bread crumbs. The sauce is the whole dish, and it is written with more boiling than it can survive.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. One and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup; half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. That is one cup of liquid against one ounce each of butter and flour, which makes a fairly stiff sauce.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is 1/2 teaspoon cayenne and 1/2 teaspoon grated nutmeg. Half a teaspoon of cayenne is genuinely hot for twelve eggs; start with a quarter and add more at the end.
- Do not actually boil the sauce for fifteen minutesOne cup of milk over direct heat in a small pan will catch and scorch long before then. Bring it just to a simmer, then hold it barely bubbling for a few minutes to cook out the flour, stirring, and thin with more milk as it tightens.
- Five more minutes with the eggs is too muchBoiling quartered hard-boiled eggs turns the whites squeaky and the yolks chalky, and hard stirring breaks them up. Fold them into the finished sauce off the heat and let them warm through for a minute or two.
- Oven temperatureThe original names none. Around 400F for ten minutes will heat the dish through and colour the crumbs; if the mixture goes in hot, the crumbs are really all you are browning, and a minute under the broiler does the same work.
- Crumbs and butterA single tablespoon of crumbs over twelve eggs is a light dusting rather than a crust. Two to three tablespoons of fresh (not dried) crumbs, tossed with the melted butter beforehand, browns more evenly than dotted bits.
- TruffleHalf a teaspoon of chopped truffle added after baking is there for aroma, which is why it goes on last. Fresh truffle is the intent; jarred truffle peelings are a fair substitute, truffle oil a poor one.
- YieldTwelve eggs in a cup of sauce will serve about six as a lunch or supper dish, with bread or toast. It is best eaten freshly made, so scale it to what will be eaten.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book, the work of a chef long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it belongs to a long alphabetical run of egg preparations, each hung on a proper name: a place, a patron, a fancy. The naming convention was standard restaurant practice of the period rather than a claim of origin, and "Van Winkle" here may nod at Washington Irving's Rip and the old Dutch Hudson Valley the character came from, though nothing in the recipe is particularly Dutch. What the dish really is is hard-boiled eggs bound in a béchamel and gratinéed, a thrifty preparation dressed up with cayenne, nutmeg and a scatter of truffle.