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Poached Eggs, New London
Place four ounces crab meat in a sautoire with half ounce butter and gill sherry or white wine, cover the pan and cook five minutes, then keep hot. Mix in a saucepan a half ounce each butter and flour, add a gill cream, half gill milk, and continually mix until it comes to a boil. Add crab meat, season with half teaspoon salt, saltspoon each cayenne and grated nutmeg, mix well and cook for five minutes. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, pour crab meat over eggs and serve.
A cream-and-crab sauce over poached eggs, written in the shorthand of a professional kitchen where a cook was assumed to know the proportions of a béchamel. Two conversions and one warning about crab will carry you through.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup (4 fl oz), so the sherry is 1/2 cup, the cream 1/2 cup and the milk 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, and for cayenne that is generous — start with a pinch.
- SautoireA straight-sided shallow pan, essentially a modern sauté pan or a wide skillet with a lid. Nothing special is required beyond a lid tight enough to hold the wine's steam.
- Weights to volumesHalf an ounce of butter is a tablespoon; half an ounce of flour is a scant 2 tablespoons. Four ounces of crab meat is a single cup, lightly packed.
- The crab is already cookedPicked crab meat sold in tubs or cans has already been cooked. The five minutes in butter and wine is to warm it and take the raw edge off the sherry, not to cook it; the second five minutes in the sauce is enough to blur it into shreds. Fold it in at the end and heat through for a minute or two, and pick through the meat for shell fragments first.
- Sauce consistencyA tablespoon of butter and a scant 2 tablespoons of flour against 3/4 cup of cream and milk, plus whatever sherry comes across with the crab, gives a sauce meant to coat the eggs and run rather than sit. If yours is thinner than you like, let it simmer down rather than adding more flour.
- Poaching and timingPoach the eggs last, while the sauce is holding over low heat, and lift them onto the toast as soon as the whites are set and the yolks still liquid, roughly 3 minutes in barely trembling water. Sauce held too long over direct heat will skin over; a bowl of hot water underneath solves it.
- YieldTwelve eggs on twelve pieces of toast serves six as a first course or brunch dish, two eggs each. The quantities halve cleanly.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1906) as an encyclopedia of the sort of composed dishes a good American hotel kitchen was expected to turn out on demand, and its egg chapter runs to dozens of named variations. Names like "New London" were the standard way of filing such variations: a place attached to a garnish so that a cook reading a menu knew what was coming. New London, Connecticut, was a working port on Long Island Sound with a shellfish trade to match, so the association with crab is a plausible one, though the recipe's connection to the town is a matter of naming convention rather than documented local tradition. The crab meat was presumably hand-picked, sold by the pound in coastal markets and expensive enough that four ounces stretched across twelve eggs counted as sensible economy.