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Poached Eggs, Mexicaine
Cut twelve quarter-inch-thick slices from a stale sandwich loaf, then cut each slice two inches in diameter. Toast a nice golden colour and lightly butter them. Finely chop four sweet Spanish red peppers and place in a frying pan with a teaspoon melted butter and heat five minutes, tossing meanwhile. Evenly spread over the slices of toast, arrange on a dish and keep hot. Plunge three sound green peppers in boiling water three minutes, take up and with a coarse towel remove skin. Cut in quarters and fry in a frying pan with teaspoon melted butter to a nice light brown colour. Prepare twelve poached eggs, lay them on the toast, then arrange a piece of green pepper on top of each egg and serve.
A canapé-style egg dish that stands or falls on timing: everything but the eggs can be held warm, and the eggs must be poached last and served at once.
- The hinge — poach lastSoft-poached eggs stiffen and weep if held. Have the toast, red pepper and green pepper quarters ready and warm, then poach the twelve eggs in two or three batches in barely simmering water, three to four minutes each, and plate immediately.
- "Sweet Spanish red peppers"Most likely sweet ripe red peppers of the pimiento type. Fresh red bell peppers are the closest supermarket equivalent; drained jarred pimientos work and need only warming through rather than the full five minutes.
- "Sound green peppers""Sound" simply means unblemished and firm — a quality instruction, not a variety. Use ordinary green bell peppers.
- Peeling by blanchingThree minutes in boiling water loosens the skin unevenly on modern thick-walled bells. Charring them over a flame or under a hot broiler until blistered, then steaming them covered for ten minutes, peels far more cleanly and gives a better flavour for the subsequent browning.
- The toast roundsQuarter-inch slices from a stale sandwich loaf cut to two inches across: a plain cutter or a small glass does the job. Stale bread presumably toasts crisp without drying to a cracker, and holds up better under a wet poached egg.
- Butter quantitiesA teaspoon of butter for four chopped peppers, and another for three peppers' worth of quarters, is thin by modern standards. A tablespoon in each pan is closer to what the browning actually needs.
- YieldTwelve rounds — a first course for six, or lunch for four. Everything but the eggs can be prepared an hour ahead and reheated.
Filippini's book belongs to the era when a French kitchen vocabulary was still the working language of American hotel cooking, and a dish name ending in the feminine adjective — Mexicaine, Portugaise, Florentine — signalled a fixed garnish rather than any real geography. À la mexicaine in that system generally meant sweet peppers, sometimes with tomato and mushroom, and it turns up attached to eggs, chicken and veal with equal freedom. There is nothing Mexican about the technique here; the name simply announces the sweet pepper, prized for its sweetness and its colour on a plate. Poached eggs on buttered rounds of toast were the standard vehicle for such garnishes, being cheap, quick, and neutral enough to carry whatever the name promised.