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Fried Eggs on Toast
Prepare six round toasts three inches in diameter of a golden colour. Broil six thin slices of lean raw ham for a minute on each side, arrange one slice on each toast, and trim to fit the toasts nicely.
Heat in a small frying pan a teaspoon butter, carefully crack in two fresh eggs, season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon pepper and fry for three minutes, then dress the two eggs on one toast; repeat the same five times and serve very hot.
A straightforward hot breakfast dish, but the instructions assume a cook working one pan at a time with a hot plate to hold finished portions. Read it as six separate two-egg fries, not one large batch.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is generally reckoned at about a quarter teaspoon (some sources make it less), so each pair of eggs gets roughly 1/4 teaspoon salt and half that of pepper. That is generous by modern taste; a pinch of each will do.
- YieldSix toasts, twelve eggs, six slices of ham: six servings. The whole thing is scaled for a family breakfast or a small buffet.
- The three minutesThree minutes in butter will generally take the yolks well past soft. For a soft yolk, count on about two minutes covered, or baste the whites with the hot butter until they are just opaque.
- "Lean raw ham"This means uncooked cured ham, sliced thin — the sort sold today as country ham or as raw gammon. A minute a side under the broiler is enough for a thin slice. If you substitute fresh pork, cook it through; if you use ready-cooked deli ham, it needs only warming.
- Doing it in batchesA teaspoon of butter is right for two eggs in a small pan, so plan on six rounds of frying and fresh butter each time. Hold the finished toasts on a plate in a 200F oven, uncovered, so the toast does not soften.
- The toast roundsThree-inch rounds cut from sandwich bread with a cutter or a glass; toast them dry rather than buttered so they stay crisp under the eggs. Trim the ham to the toast after broiling, when it has shrunk and curled.
- Timing the whole dishToast and ham first, both held warm, then the eggs last and in quick succession. The instruction to serve very hot is the only real difficulty in the recipe.
Eggs on toast with a slice of ham beneath them is the plain ancestor of dozens of dressed-up versions — the same architecture underlies eggs Benedict. The insistence on cutting the toast into neat three-inch rounds and trimming the ham to match is often said to be characteristic of professional practice around 1900, when a dish was judged partly on the geometry of the plate; Alexander Filippini, who compiled this book from a long career in New York restaurant kitchens, wrote for cooks who had been trained to think that way. Its presence in a volume titled The International Cook Book is a reminder that such collections were not only anthologies of exotica but working references.