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Poached Eggs, Clayburg
Cut from a sandwich loaf twelve quarter-inch-thick slices, cut each slice with a pastry cutter into pieces two inches in diameter, toast to a nice golden colour, spread a very little caviare over each slice and place on a tin. Arrange a poached egg on top of each toast, evenly pour a Soubise sauce and sprinkle a little grated Parmesan cheese over the twelve eggs, then set in a very brisk oven for three minutes, remove, dress on a dish and serve.
A composed egg dish that is really an assembly job: everything is cooked before it goes in the oven, and the three minutes at the end are only to glaze the sauce and melt the cheese.
- Very brisk ovenRead this as 475–500F, or use a broiler set high with the pan on a middle rack. The point is colour on the sauce in three minutes, not further cooking of the eggs.
- Sandwich loafA close-crumbed white pan loaf, firmer and finer than most modern sandwich bread. A day-old Pullman loaf or a plain white sourdough sliced thin holds up best; airy supermarket bread collapses under sauce.
- The roundsTwelve two-inch rounds from twelve quarter-inch slices means one round per slice, with a good deal of trim left over. Cut two or three rounds per slice instead and keep the scraps for crumbs.
- Soubise sauceAn onion sauce: onions sweated in butter until wholly soft and without colour, then either puréed into béchamel or cooked with rice and sieved. It must be thick enough to sit on the egg rather than run off the toast.
- Poaching for reheatingPoach the eggs soft, slip them into cold water, and drain them well on a cloth before assembling. Wet eggs will thin the sauce and soften the toast; the oven blast is too short to drive off that moisture.
- Caviare"A very little" is right — the salt concentrates under a bland sauce. Any firm salt-cured roe works, but avoid pressed or heavily brined lumpfish roe, which bleeds grey-black into the sauce.
- YieldThe recipe gives no number of servings. Twelve rounds would go two apiece for six as a first course, or three apiece for four at a substantial breakfast. Assemble on the tin, sauce at the last moment, and bake in one batch.
Soubise sauce carries the name of the eighteenth-century French marshal Charles de Rohan, Prince de Soubise, whose kitchen is traditionally credited with the onion pur ation repeated in the classical French repertoire rather than documented in his own papers. The dish itself belongs to the hotel and restaurant style that Filippini's International Cook Book collected: garnished egg preparations, each given a place-name or a patron's name, run to dozens of entries in books of this period because they let a kitchen produce something apparently novel out of stock sauces and a poaching pan. The touch of caviare under the egg fits an era when Russian roe had become a familiar grace note on American hotel menus and was used by the teaspoon rather than the ounce, though a garnish of this kind spans too long a period to date the dish closely.