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Poached Eggs, Hungarian
Place in a saucepan two light gills tomato sauce, add a half teaspoon paprika, saltspoon salt, mix well and boil for fifteen minutes. Shift pan to corner of range and incorporate little by little a half ounce good butter, continually mixing while adding it. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, pour sauce over and serve.
A paprika-tomato sauce finished with butter, spooned over poached eggs. The whole dish stands or falls on the sauce, which needs only a few adjustments in translation.
- Two light gillsA gill is half a cup, so two gills is one cup; "light" means a slightly scant measure. Reckon on a generous three-quarters to one cup of tomato sauce, which reduces noticeably over fifteen minutes.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Given that most bottled or canned tomato sauce is already salted, taste before adding it all.
- Half ounce butterOne tablespoon. It is beaten in off the heat, a little at a time, to emulsify rather than melt into an oily film — the same monter au beurre finish used across the French repertoire.
- Shift pan to corner of rangeOn a coal or wood range the corner was the cool zone. Take the pan off the burner entirely and let it stop bubbling for a moment before the butter goes in; if the sauce boils after the butter, the emulsion breaks.
- PaprikaHalf a teaspoon of sweet Hungarian paprika, not hot and not smoked; either of those will overwhelm a cup of sauce.
- Boiling the sauce fifteen minutesA period tomato sauce was thin and needed cooking down. A thick modern passata or canned sauce will scorch and turn bitter in that time; simmer gently and stop when it coats a spoon.
- The eggsPoach them last, or hold them in warm water and drain hard on a cloth before plating — water leaking onto the toast is the usual failure here.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a breakfast or luncheon dish, two eggs on toast apiece.
Paprika is the marker that makes this "Hungarian" in the grammar of turn-of-the-century restaurant cookery: in the French-trained kitchens that produced books like this one, a garnish or sauce reddened with paprika was labelled hongroise almost by reflex, whether or not it had any connection to a Hungarian table. The spice had reached the wider European professional kitchen in the later nineteenth century and was fashionable enough by 1900 that a half teaspoon could carry a whole national name. What is actually being taught here is a French technique — a reduction mounted with butter off the heat — applied to the most economical of hotel dishes, eggs on toast, which is why it sits comfortably in a book that files the world's cooking by adjective.