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Fried Eggs, Robinson
Remove the gall from six chicken livers and cut them into small squares. Heat a light tablespoon butter in a frying pan. Season with two saltspoons salt and a saltspoon white pepper and brown for five minutes; drain off the butter at the bottom of the pan, pour in two tablespoons sherry, half gill demi-glace and half gill tomato sauce; boil for five minutes. Lightly butter a small frying pan, then carefully crack in two fresh eggs. Season with a saltspoon salt and half saltspoon white pepper and fry for three minutes. Glide on a large, hot dish and proceed to prepare five more portions in same manner. Pour the liver preparation over them and serve.
A garnished fried-egg dish in the old restaurant idiom: eggs cooked to order in a small pan, sauced with a quick chicken-liver ragout. The measurements are pre-standard and the timings assume a very hot range.
- Saltspoon and gillA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon; a gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons. The two saltspoons of salt for six livers is about half a teaspoon, which is reasonable.
- The gallModern supermarket livers are usually already trimmed, but check each lobe for a greenish-yellow stain or attached sac and cut it away generously. Any gall left behind turns the whole sauce bitter and nothing later will fix it.
- Five minutes is too long for the liversDiced chicken liver browns in two to three minutes over high heat and then goes grainy. Sear them hard, pull the pan off, and let them finish in the sauce rather than in the butter.
- Demi-glaceA rich reduced brown sauce, classically espagnole let down with brown stock and reduced. Commercial demi-glace concentrate or a glace de viande diluted to sauce consistency both work; a thin stock will not cling to the eggs. The tomato sauce here means a plain cooked tomato sauce, not ketchup.
- Frying the eggsThree minutes in a buttered pan gives a set white and a soft yolk on a hot heavy pan; on a modern moderate burner it may take four. The yolks should stay loose, since they are part of the sauce once the liver preparation goes over them.
- One pair at a timeThe instruction to repeat five more times is deliberate — two eggs per small pan keeps the whites from spreading and merging. Hold the finished pairs on a warmed platter and sauce everything at the last moment.
- YieldSix portions of two eggs each, twelve eggs in total. The sauce is about ten tablespoons of liquid before it boils down, plus the six diced livers, to divide among them. Scale the liver mixture down proportionally if you are cooking for two.
Filippini's International Cook Book came out of Delmonico's in New York, and the surname-title format — a dish "Robinson," and others like it — is the house habit of naming a garnish after a patron, a chef, or a colleague, then filing it in the book as a fixed formula. The pattern is generally traced to nineteenth-century French restaurant practice, where a named preparation was shorthand a kitchen brigade could execute without further instruction; who Robinson was is not recorded here and probably was not remembered even then. What the recipe does preserve is the period's approach to eggs as a vehicle for sauce rather than a plain breakfast: demi-glace, a derivative of espagnole, and tomato, itself one of the classic mother sauces, appear in half-gill measures over eggs cooked two at a time to order, which tells you the dish was written for a line cook with a stockpot already going, not for a home range.