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Fried Poached Eggs, Montebello
Poach twelve fresh eggs for four minutes in three quarts boiling water, with a tablespoon salt and half gill vinegar. Lift with a skimmer, neatly trim, carefully roll in melted butter, then in grated Parmesan cheese, place in a frying basket and fry in boiling fat for one minute. Lift up drain on a cloth, sprinkle a little salt over, dress on a dish with a folded napkin, decorate with a little parsley greens and serve with a hot Montebello sauce separately.
A grand-hotel egg course: poached eggs chilled, jacketed in Parmesan and deep-fried to order. The whole thing turns on the eggs being firm and dry before they go near the fat.
- Half a gill of vinegarA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons, in three quarts of water. That works out a little above the tablespoon-per-quart often given today, which would help set the whites firmly enough to survive trimming and frying.
- Four minutes is not a mistakeModern poaching aims at three minutes and a running yolk. Here the egg has to hold together through rolling, coating and a minute in hot fat, so the yolk is meant to come out just barely soft rather than liquid.
- Cool and dry before coatingThe recipe skips this, but it is the hinge. Slide the trimmed eggs into cold water, then drain them thoroughly on a cloth and chill them until firm. A warm, wet egg will shed its cheese in the fryer and can spit violently.
- Butter and Parmesan aloneGrated Parmesan over melted butter is a thin, fragile coat that browns quickly and can loosen. Grate the cheese very fine so it sits close to the surface; a hard, dry aged Parmesan behaves far better than the damp pre-grated kind.
- "Boiling fat"The book gives no temperature; in modern terms this means deep fat in the usual frying range, somewhere around 350-375F. At that heat a minute is enough to crisp and colour the cheese; longer and the yolk sets hard.
- The frying basketA basket keeps the eggs off the pan bottom, but they are delicate. Lower two or three at a time in a spider or slotted spoon rather than crowding twelve into one basket, and let the fat come back to temperature between batches.
- Montebello sauceThe recipe assumes the sauce is given elsewhere in the volume; it is not one most modern cooks will have to hand. Check the original sauce entry if the volume is available to you.
- Yield and serviceTwelve eggs is six portions of two as a lunch or supper course. The folded napkin on the platter is period service and also practical: it absorbs the last of the frying fat.
The International Cook Book belongs to the great age of French-trained hotel cookery in America, and this dish is pure restaurant thinking: an egg is poached, cooled, dressed in cheese and fried to order so that the finish takes sixty seconds while the guest waits. Frying an already-poached egg was a standard trick of the period repertoire, alongside poached eggs breaded and grilled, or set in aspic. The name follows classical convention, where garnishes and sauces were christened after places, battles and titled families — Montebello is generally traced to the northern Italian village that gave its name to a Napoleonic dukedom and to a battle of the 1859 Italian campaign, the kind of reference that filled French menus of the later nineteenth century. Little of the name survives in modern kitchens, but the technique does: it is the same logic behind the deep-fried egg that turns up on restaurant plates today.