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Fried Eggs, Mouquin
Cut from a Virginia ham six thin slices, arrange on a broiler and broil on a charcoal fire one minute on each side. Remove and keep on a plate. Cut from a stale loaf of sandwich bread six slices one-third of an inch in thickness; then cut them two inches in diameter, lightly baste with a little good melted butter, place on a tin, set in oven six minutes, or till a nice golden colour. Remove, dress on a hot dish. Cut ham same size as the slices of toast and arrange the pieces on top of the toast.
Lightly butter a small black frying pan, crack in one fresh egg. Season with a very little salt and pepper, and fry three minutes, slide the egg on top of one piece of ham. Prepare five more in a similar way. Pour half the quantity of a Bordelaise sauce over the eggs and serve.
A composed egg dish of six identical rounds: buttered croûte, ham, fried egg, sauce. Everything hinges on the assembly being hot at once, so have the sauce made and warm before the first egg goes into the pan.
- Virginia hamThis means dry-cured country ham, salty and firm, not the moist pink boiling ham sold as "Virginia style" today. Cut it very thin; a minute a side is all it needs, and any longer turns it leathery. If you cannot get country ham, thin-sliced prosciutto or speck behaves similarly.
- Charcoal fireA stovetop grill pan or a dry cast-iron skillet over high heat gives the same result. The point is fast, dry heat that renders a little fat and scorches the edges, not smoke flavour.
- "Lightly baste with butter"Here baste means brush. Melted butter over the bread rounds, then into the oven — call it 375-400F for the six minutes specified, watching for golden rather than dark.
- Cutting the roundsTwo-inch rounds from third-inch slices of stale sandwich loaf: a plain cutter or a small glass. The recipe gives no reason for insisting on stale bread, though stale crumb does cut more cleanly than fresh.
- The small black frying panA well-seasoned steel or cast-iron pan, small enough to take one egg at a time, so each egg keeps a round shape matching the ham and toast; that is presumably why the recipe repeats the operation six times rather than frying all six together.
- Three minutesThat is a long fry by current taste and will set the yolk through. For a soft yolk, cover the pan and give it 90 seconds to two minutes, then slide it off.
- Bordelaise sauceA red wine and shallot reduction finished with demi-glace, traditionally garnished with poached beef marrow. Filippini gives it elsewhere in the book; any modern version works, and it should be spooned over sparingly so the toast does not collapse.
- "Half the quantity"Ambiguous as written; it most likely means half of a batch of Bordelaise made elsewhere in the book rather than a stated volume. Half a cup or so would cover six eggs, but the recipe gives no measure.
- YieldSix rounds: three servings at breakfast or lunch, six as a first course.
Mouquin's was one of the best-known French restaurants in New York in the decades either side of 1900, on Sixth Avenue in the Twenties, and its name attached itself to dishes the way Delmonico's did. Alexander Filippini, who compiled The International Cook Book, had spent years in the Delmonico kitchens, and a great many of his entries are restaurant plates recorded as the trade cooked them rather than dishes with any folk history — hence the exact diameters, the individual pan, and the assumption that a pot of Bordelaise is already standing at the back of the stove. The combination itself is older and broader than the name: eggs on ham on a fried or toasted round, sauced brown, is the same architecture as eggs Bénédict and its many nineteenth-century cousins, differing only in whether the sauce is butter-based or meat-based. What the attribution really records is that in this period an American cook consulting a cookbook expected to be given the restaurant's version, credited to the restaurant.