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Poached Eggs, Cream Sauce
Have two quarts boiling water in a saucepan, with a teaspoon salt and two tablespoons vinegar. Crack in six fresh eggs, one by one, and poach for three minutes. Have six freshly prepared toasts on a large dish. Lift up the eggs with a skimmer and place two on each toast; poach six more in a similar way and place on the toasts.
Prepare a cream sauce pour it over the eggs and serve.
A plain restaurant method written in restaurant shorthand. Two things need attention before you start: the egg count, and what "cream sauce" meant to the writer.
- Count the eggsSix toasts each take two eggs, so the finished dish needs twelve, poached in two batches of six. The first line says six because that is one panful, not the total.
- The waterTwo quarts gives a useful working depth in a deep saucepan, enough that the egg sets before it reaches the bottom. The recipe says boiling water; a bare tremble rather than a rolling boil will keep the whites from shredding.
- Vinegar and saltTwo tablespoons of vinegar in two quarts is a light hand and is generally held to help the white coagulate. The teaspoon of salt is the recipe's own; opinions differ on whether salt helps or hinders the set.
- Three minutesThat is a soft, liquid yolk with a just-set white, which is the point of the dish. Fresh eggs hold together far better than old ones, hence the specification.
- Cream sauceIn a book of this vintage this means a white sauce: about 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked without colour, then a cup of hot milk or milk and cream whisked in, simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Make it before the eggs and keep it warm with a lid on.
- DrainingLift each egg with a slotted spoon and rest it a moment on a folded towel. Poaching water carried onto toast turns it to paste, and it will thin the sauce.
- Toast"Freshly prepared toasts" means slices cut to hold two eggs each and toasted at the last minute; some cooks of the period buttered them, some did not. The recipe specifies nothing about the bread itself.
- YieldSix servings of two eggs each, which reads as a lunch or supper dish rather than a breakfast one.
Poached eggs on toast under a white sauce sit at the modest end of a large family of hotel and restaurant egg dishes — eggs Benedict, eggs Bénédictine and eggs à la reine among them — all built on the same foundation of a soft-poached egg, something starchy beneath it and a sauce over the top. The scale and shorthand here suggest service rather than a family breakfast: a pan of acidulated water, eggs poached in batches of six, a skimmer and a large dish, all aimed at getting a dozen eggs to the table at once. "Cream sauce" is what many American cookbooks of the period called a plain milk-based white sauce, used everywhere from creamed chicken to creamed vegetables.