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Fried Eggs, Anchovy Butter
Crack two fresh eggs in a lightly buttered, small frying pan. Season with a half saltspoon salt and quarter saltspoon white pepper and fry for three minutes. Glide them on a hot dish and keep warm; proceed to prepare five other portions in the same way. When all are on the dish place an ounce of butter in a small frying pan, toss well on the fire until of a light brown, then pour in a teaspoon anchovy essence and a teaspoon good vinegar; toss lightly again, then pour over the eggs and serve.
A brasserie-style fried egg dish that lives or dies on the brown butter finish. The eggs themselves are cooked gently; the sauce is made fast at the end and poured over everything at once.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is roughly 1/4 teaspoon, so a half saltspoon is about 1/8 teaspoon of salt and a quarter saltspoon about 1/16 teaspoon — a pinch — of white pepper, per two eggs.
- YieldSix portions of two eggs each, twelve eggs in all. The ounce of butter for the sauce dresses the whole dish, not one plate.
- Cook in batches, but do not stallThe original has you fry two at a time and hold them warm. Hold the finished eggs on a warmed platter in a 200F oven, uncovered, so the whites do not steam and toughen.
- Three minutesThree minutes over a low flame gives a set white and a liquid yolk. Over anything higher the bottoms brown and go leathery before the whites set; keep the heat modest and cover the pan for the last minute if the tops are still translucent.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled condiment of pounded anchovy, salt and spice — Gentleman's Relish or anchovy paste is the nearest thing on a modern shelf. Two or three mashed oil-packed anchovy fillets stirred into the browning butter also works; taste before adding any further salt.
- The brown butterThis is the hinge. Take the butter to the point where the milk solids are nut-brown and the smell turns toasty, then add the essence and vinegar off the direct flame — the liquid will spit, and butter goes from brown to burnt in seconds.
- The vinegarThe recipe specifies only a teaspoon of 'good vinegar'. A white wine vinegar suits it; malt or cider vinegar is more assertive and may compete with the anchovy. The acid is there to cut the butter, not to be tasted on its own.
- ServingPour and serve immediately — the sauce sets and dulls as it cools. Toast or fried bread underneath is in keeping with the period.
Anchovy essence was one of the workhorse flavourings of the nineteenth-century English and Anglo-French kitchen, a bottled shortcut to the salty, savoury depth that Roman cooks got from garum and that we now reach for soy sauce or fish sauce to supply. It turned up in beef sauces, in devilled dishes, in savouries served at the end of dinner, and — as here — married to browned butter and a splash of vinegar, a combination that recalls the classic beurre noir served with skate. The International Cook Book, compiled by Alexander Filippini, a long-serving chef at Delmonico's in New York, collected dishes of this kind by the hundred: quick, restaurant-scaled egg preparations that a cook could turn out to order.