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Eggs, Zurichoise
Crack eight fresh eggs, place the whites in a copper basin and the yolks in a bowl. Beat up the whites for eight minutes, adding two tablespoons flour and two tablespoons melted butter, then add the whites to the yolks with two ounces Swiss cheese, cut in very small dice pieces, half teaspoon salt, one saltspoon cayenne pepper and a saltspoon grated nutmeg; mix well with a skimmer for two minutes. Toast six slices fresh bread to a nice golden colour, lightly butter them, then lay them one beside another at the bottom of a baking dish, and carefully drop the eggs over the toast. Set in a brisk oven for five minutes, remove and serve.
A folded egg-and-cheese batter baked over buttered toast — closer to a loose soufflé than to scrambled eggs. The instructions are terse in the way of professional kitchens, and two of the numbers need adjusting.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So a scant 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne and grated nutmeg, which is assertive but not unreasonable against eight eggs and cheese.
- Brisk ovenRead this as a hot oven, roughly 400-425F. Cooler than that and the mixture sets slowly and weeps rather than puffing.
- The five minutes is shortEight eggs' worth of batter over six slices of toast will not be set through in five minutes, even at 450F. Bake until the top is browned and the centre is just firm — 12 to 15 minutes in a shallow dish — and check that the middle is set rather than liquid.
- Copper basinTrace copper stabilises beaten whites, and copper basins were standard equipment in kitchens of this kind. A clean stainless or glass bowl with a pinch of cream of tartar does the same job; avoid plastic, which holds fat.
- Beating timeEight minutes is hand-whisk time. With an electric mixer, three minutes to firm peaks is plenty — overbeaten whites go grainy and will not fold.
- Order of mixingBeating flour and melted butter into the whites, as written, knocks much of the air out. Better results come from whisking the flour into the yolks with the butter, then folding the whites in with a light hand and stopping while streaks are still visible.
- Swiss cheeseTwo ounces of genuine Emmental or Gruyere, diced small. Pre-sliced supermarket "Swiss" is milder and wetter; the diced pieces are meant to stay distinct and melt into pockets.
- The toastToast the bread well and butter it lightly so it stays crisp under the batter — untoasted or damp bread turns to paste. Cut the slices to fit the dish in a single close layer.
- YieldSix slices, eight eggs: a supper or luncheon dish for four to six, best served straight from the oven before it falls.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), a volume built on the premise that a good hotel kitchen should be able to produce a dish from anywhere on request, with the national label doing much of the work. "Zurichoise" here signals Swiss cheese and little else — Filippini's geographical tags are often shorthand for one defining ingredient rather than evidence of a dish actually eaten in the named place. The combination it gestures at is real enough: cheese melted over toasted bread is old and widespread in German-speaking Switzerland, where Kaseschnitte remains a standard supper. It is tempting to read the recipe as pushing that homely form toward the restaurant repertoire by lightening it with beaten whites, so the cheese arrives inside a soufflé batter rather than simply grilled on top — though that line of descent is inference rather than anything the book establishes. Either way, it is a very Escoffier-era instinct, and a good indication of what an American hotel chef of the period thought European cooking ought to look like on the plate.