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Poached Eggs, Chester
Cut a medium eggplant in twelve even slices, then with a two-inch pastry cutter cut out a piece from each slice, season all over with a teaspoon salt, half teaspoon pepper, and lightly roll them in flour. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in frying pan, arrange the eggplant in, one piece beside another, gently cook for four minutes on each side, lift up and dress on a hot dish. Prepare twelve poached eggs, but without toasts, arrange over eggplants, pour a Hollandaise sauce and adjust a very thin slice truffle over each egg and serve.
A composed egg dish in the Delmonico manner: fried eggplant rounds, poached eggs, hollandaise, truffle. The work is all in the timing, since three hot components have to meet at once.
- What to make firstHollandaise and poached eggs both hold; fried eggplant does not. Make the sauce and keep it barely warm, poach the eggs ahead and slip them into a bowl of hot (not simmering) water, then fry the eggplant last and assemble immediately.
- Slice thicknessThe recipe fixes the count at twelve but not the thickness. Half an inch is right: thinner rounds collapse under a poached egg, thicker ones will not cook through in four minutes a side.
- The pastry cutterCutting a two-inch disc from each slice gives a uniform round roughly the size of a poached egg. Eggplants are commonly a good deal wider than two inches, so the trimmings can be considerable; save them for another dish.
- SaltingA teaspoon of salt over twelve slices is seasoning, not the old degorging treatment. Today's eggplant is bred against bitterness and does not need to be drawn and rinsed, though half an hour under salt does firm the flesh and reduce how much fat it drinks.
- Two tablespoons of butter is optimisticEggplant absorbs fat greedily and the pan will go dry within a minute. Work in batches and add butter as needed, or the slices will scorch before they soften. Keep the heat moderate; butter alone browns fast.
- Poaching twelve eggsBarely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and a liquid yolk. Very fresh eggs hold their shape; older whites spread and are better poached in a strainer or a shallow ring.
- Hollandaise quantityNone is specified. About a cup, from three yolks and six ounces of butter, will coat twelve eggs. Keep it warm rather than hot, roughly 130-140F; much hotter and it can break, colder and it stiffens.
- TruffleA black truffle is what is called for, and it is a serious expense. Preserved truffle slices or truffle peelings are the honest substitute; truffle oil is not, and will overwhelm the hollandaise.
- YieldSix portions of two, as a luncheon or supper dish. Twelve single rounds also work as a first course.
The International Cook Book came out of the kitchens Alexander Filippini worked in, chiefly Delmonico's in New York, and it carries that world's habit of naming dishes after a person, a place or a patron and letting the name stand in for the garnish. "Chester" appears to be such a tag: nothing in the method is particularly English, and the label seems to function the way "Benedict," "Florentine" or "Argenteuil" does, as shorthand on a menu card for a fixed combination. Poached eggs on a fried vegetable base under hollandaise, crowned with a disc of truffle, is the same architecture as eggs Benedict, which was circulating in New York restaurants around this period, and a truffle slice was a common signal that a dish belonged to the expensive end of the carte.