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Fried Eggs, Li Hung Chang
Prepare and trim six fresh toasts, three inches square, lightly butter and place on a dish. Broil six exceedingly thin slices lean bacon for a minute on each side, remove and cut each slice in two, and arrange over the six toasts. Heat thoroughly a well-buttered, small frying pan, crack in two fresh eggs, sprinkle over a teaspoon very finely grated, cooked ham, season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper, cook for two minutes on the range, then set in the oven for one minute. Remove and carefully glide over one toast, then prepare five more portions in a similar manner. When all prepared sprinkle over half teaspoon curry powder evenly divided. Place an ounce butter in a frying pan, shuffle the pan until the butter attains a nice brown colour, then pour in a teaspoon vinegar, toss a little, then pour over the eggs and serve.
A six-portion egg dish built one pan at a time: toast, bacon, two eggs fried with grated ham, then a brown-butter-and-vinegar sauce poured over at the end. Everything hinges on having all six toasts ready before the first eggs go in.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. So each pair of eggs gets 1/4 tsp salt and 1/8 tsp pepper, which is generous for two eggs; scale back if your ham and bacon are salty.
- Scale and yieldThis serves six, using twelve eggs and six slices of bacon. The eggs are cooked in six separate two-egg batches, so a small 6-inch skillet and a steady assembly line matter more than any single technique here.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. A minute in the oven is meant only to set the whites over the top; a hot oven of 425F, or simply the broiler for 30-45 seconds, does the same work. Two minutes on the range plus one in the oven leaves the yolks soft.
- "Glide over"Slide, not flip. Loosen the eggs with a thin spatula and tip the pan so the intact pair slips onto the toast in one piece; that presentation is the whole point of cooking them two at a time.
- The curry powderHalf a teaspoon divided over six portions is a scant pinch each, sprinkled raw over cooked eggs. Period curry powders were often milder than modern blends, though they varied; if yours is assertive, warm it briefly in the browning butter instead of dusting it on dry.
- Brown butter and vinegarBrown butter sharpened with an acid; taken darker, the same sauce is the beurre noir traditionally served with skate. Take the butter to a nut-brown colour and a nutty smell, then stand back when the vinegar goes in: it will spit. Pour it over immediately.
- Grated cooked hamDry-cured or well-firmed cooked ham grates properly on a fine grater. Wet supermarket sandwich ham will smear; chop it very fine instead.
- Timing the toastButter and top the toasts with the broiled bacon first and keep them in a low oven. Toast made at the start will be leathery by the sixth batch of eggs otherwise.
The dish honours Li Hongzhang (1823-1901), the Qing viceroy and diplomat whose 1896 tour of Europe and the United States drew enormous press attention. American restaurants and cookbooks responded by attaching his name to a run of dishes, few of which had anything to do with China beyond a dusting of curry powder or a bowl of mixed scraps -- the durable legend that he inspired chop suey in New York belongs to the same wave of publicity and is traditional rather than documented. Here the Chinese element amounts to that half teaspoon of curry, itself an Anglo-Indian product rather than a Chinese one, over what is otherwise a thoroughly French plate of eggs finished with brown butter and vinegar. That mix is characteristic of The International Cook Book, where foreign names were freely applied to Delmonico's-style hotel cooking for an American readership hungry for the cosmopolitan.