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Poached Eggs, Menagere
Cut from raw lean bacon six thin slices and broil them for one minute on each side. Remove, cut them in half-inch pieces, place in saucepan with half teaspoon chopped chives, gill demi-glace, saltspoon cayenne pepper, boil for five minutes and keep hot. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, place on a hot dish, pour sauce over them and serve.
A supper dish of poached eggs under a bacon-and-demi-glace sauce. Everything hinges on having the sauce ready and hot before the eggs go into the water, since poached eggs will not wait.
- A gillHalf a cup, 4 fl oz. That is the total volume of sauce for twelve eggs, so it is a napping spoonful over each rather than a pool. Make a little extra if you want the toast moistened as well.
- Demi-glaceA reduction of brown stock and espagnole sauce, thick enough to coat a spoon. Few home kitchens keep it now; a good reduced veal or beef stock, or a commercial demi-glace concentrate diluted to a syrupy consistency, does the job. Do not substitute thin stock, which will flood the toast.
- A saltspoonA quarter teaspoon. That much cayenne in half a cup of sauce is genuinely fierce by current taste; an eighth is closer to what most people want, and you can add more at the end.
- The bacon"Raw lean bacon" means uncooked bacon with a high meat-to-fat ratio, nearer to pancetta or a thick-cut back rasher than to crisp American breakfast bacon; the recipe does not specify whether it is smoked. A minute a side under a hot broiler renders it without crisping, which is the point: it goes on to simmer in the sauce for five minutes and should stay tender.
- Poaching twelve eggsUse the freshest eggs you have, a wide pan of barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, and work in batches of three or four. Three minutes gives a set white and a liquid yolk. They can be held in warm water and drained on a cloth just before serving if you would rather not race the sauce.
- Season the sauce lastBacon and reduced demi-glace are both salty. Taste after the five-minute simmer, not before.
- YieldTwelve eggs serves six as a lunch or supper course, two eggs and two rounds of toast each. Use a bread that will hold up, and butter it.
Ménagère is French for housewife or housekeeper, and in nineteenth-century kitchen French it labelled dishes done in a plain, domestic, thrifty manner as opposed to the elaborate garnishes of the restaurant repertoire. The name is a little optimistic here: a household that keeps demi-glace on hand is a household with a stockpot going and someone to tend it, which in 1906 meant a cook. The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, and its pages are full of this sort of half-domestic, half-professional cooking, in which a simple idea rests on a foundation of restaurant groundwork. Eggs served on toast under a brown sauce with bacon belong to a broad family of late-Victorian and Edwardian breakfast, luncheon and after-theatre supper dishes, the same impulse that produced eggs Benedict and its many rivals in the New York hotels of the period.