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Fried Eggs, Biarritz
Cut from a stale loaf of sandwich bread six slices quarter of an inch thick, lightly trim off crusts, dip in milk, then in beaten egg. Heat one and a half tablespoons melted butter in a frying pan, add the slices of toast, one beside another, and fry three minutes on each side. Remove, place on a hot dish. Broil six very thin slices raw ham one minute on each side, arrange a slice on top of each slice of toast. Heat in a small black frying pan a teaspoon melted butter, crack in one fresh egg and fry three minutes, then lift up with a skimmer and lay over toast. Prepare five more in a similar way. Season equally with a very little salt and white pepper and serve.
A composed egg-and-ham dish in the classical French manner, assembled in three stages. The only real difficulty is keeping everything hot while you fry six eggs one at a time.
- Stale bread is the hingeFresh sandwich bread turns to paste the moment it meets milk and egg. Use bread a day or two old, cut a full quarter-inch thick, and dip briefly rather than soaking.
- "Slices of toast"The bread is not toasted first. Filippini uses toast loosely for the fried slices themselves, which are essentially unsweetened French toast, or pain perdu.
- Butter quantityA tablespoon and a half will not fry six egg-dipped slices in one pan. Work in two batches, adding fresh butter each time, or use a wide skillet and closer to four tablespoons total.
- "A small black frying pan"A seasoned iron or blue-steel pan; such pans were often reserved for eggs and not scoured, the point being a slick surface, so any well-behaved nonstick or cast-iron pan does the job.
- The ham"Raw ham" here means uncooked ham, not a cooked deli slice; it may well have been a dry-cured leg such as Bayonne, though the recipe does not say. Slice it thin and cook it through under the broiler rather than trusting the stated minute per side.
- Egg timingThree minutes in butter gives a firm white and a set yolk. For a soft yolk, pull the eggs at about two minutes and baste the whites with the hot butter instead.
- White pepperSpecified chiefly for looks, so black flecks do not show on the white of the egg. Black pepper will show, and tastes noticeably different from white.
- Order of workFry the bread first and hold it on a warmed platter in a 200F oven, broil the ham, then do the eggs last and serve at once. Nothing in the dish improves by waiting.
- YieldSix slices, so six servings as a first course or three as a substantial breakfast.
Biarritz, on the Basque coast of France, became fashionable when Napoleon III and the Empress Eugénie built a villa there in the 1850s, and by the turn of the century it was one of the resorts that a New York restaurant kitchen could invoke by name and expect diners to recognize. In classical French garnish nomenclature a place-name usually points to a regional ingredient, and here it is plausibly the cured ham of the southwest, the Bayonne ham cured a short distance inland from Biarritz itself. The dish belongs to a large family of ham-and-egg-on-fried-bread preparations of which eggs Benedict is the survivor; Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's, collected dozens of such small composed egg dishes in The International Cook Book, where a single page might travel from Vienna to Andalusia. That the bread is dipped in milk and egg rather than simply toasted makes a richer, sturdier base that will not go soggy under a fried egg.