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Poached Eggs, Egyptian
Mix in a saucepan a half tablespoon butter with tablespoon flour, pour in a gill milk, half gill cream, and sharply mix until it comes to boil. Thoroughly drain a half pint canned corn and add to sauce with half teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and cook for five minutes. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, pour sauce over and serve.
A creamed-corn sauce over poached eggs, written in the compressed style of a professional chef's notebook. The measurements need translating and the sauce quantity needs a hard look before you scale it to twelve eggs.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so the sauce takes 1/2 cup milk and 1/4 cup cream. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, giving 1/4 teaspoon each of cayenne and nutmeg — the cayenne is assertive at that level, and a pinch is defensible.
- Half a pint of cornHalf a pint drained is about one cup. Drain it hard and blot it, or the sauce will thin as it cooks; modern sweet-corn varieties are also likely to be sweeter than what Filippini would have opened.
- Scale the sauceThree-quarters of a cup of liquid thickened and loaded with corn is barely enough to nap twelve eggs. Double the whole sauce if you are actually serving twelve, and keep it loose enough to pour.
- Sharply mix That means whisk constantly over medium heat until it thickens and just bubbles. After the corn goes in, drop the heat — five minutes of a thick starch-bound sauce on high will scorch on the bottom.
- Poaching twelve eggsPoach ahead into cold water, trim the ragged whites, and reheat in hot salted water for thirty seconds as the toast comes up. Twelve eggs at once in one pan cools the water and gives you feathered whites.
- YieldTwo eggs per person, so six servings as a lunch or supper dish.
Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York, compiled The International Cook Book (1906) as a vast index of dishes filed under national labels, and the labels are often looser than they look — a garnish, a spice, or a single ingredient was frequently enough to earn a dish a country.