Home › The World's Kitchen › Poached Eggs, Aix Les Bains
Poached Eggs, Aix Les Bains
Cut from a stale sandwich loaf twelve quarter-inch-thick slices, then cut to two inches in diameter and toast to a light brown. Place in saucepan a half gill white wine, saltspoon grated nutmeg, and place on fire; when thoroughly boiling add three ounces grated Swiss cheese and sharply mix with a wooden spoon until thoroughly melted, spread cheese over the twelve toasts evenly and arrange on a hot dish. Dress twelve poached eggs, sprinkle a little finely chopped parsley over and serve.
A Savoyard cheese toast with a poached egg on top — essentially single-serving fondue used as a plinth. The whole thing succeeds or fails on how you treat the cheese.
- Never let the cheese boilAdd the grated cheese off the heat or over the barest flame and stir constantly until it melts. Boiled cheese breaks: the fat separates and the protein tightens into rubbery strings that will not spread.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so a half gill is 2 fluid ounces, or 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon — a generous amount of nutmeg for this quantity, and worth halving if your nutmeg is freshly grated.
- The wine is structuralA dry, acidic white — Savoie, Alpine whites, dry Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc — keeps the melted cheese emulsified. A soft, low-acid or oaked wine will let it separate. Tossing the grated cheese with a scant teaspoon of cornstarch is a modern insurance policy the original does not need but will not resent.
- "Swiss cheese"In 1906 this meant Gruyere or Emmental, not the mild plastic-wrapped American product sold under the name. Gruyere, Comte or Beaufort all melt properly; three ounces is about 3/4 cup grated.
- The toast roundsA day-old sandwich loaf cut into quarter-inch slices and stamped into 2-inch rounds. Toast them lightly, not dark — they need to stay firm under a wet egg without turning to glass.
- TimingMelted cheese begins stiffening within a minute of leaving the pan. Have the toasts lined up on a warmed dish and the eggs already poached and drained before the cheese goes on the fire, then work fast.
- PoachingBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, 3 minutes for a liquid yolk. Lift each egg onto a folded towel for a moment; water carried over will soak the toast and thin the cheese.
- YieldTwelve toasts and twelve eggs serves six as a first course or lunch, or four generously.
Aix-les-Bains is a spa town on the Lac du Bourget in Savoie, and the name here is doing what French kitchen names usually do — flagging a regional idiom rather than a specific invention. Savoie is fondue country: Gruyere-type mountain cheeses melted with white wine, seasoned with nutmeg, and eaten on bread. This recipe simply portions that mixture onto toast rounds and crowns each with a poached egg, a construction the classical repertoire applied under many different geographic labels. The book it comes from, Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), was the work of a Delmonico's man who spent his career putting continental restaurant cookery into a form American households could follow, which may explain why the instructions are precise about slice thickness while saying little about managing the heat.