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Poached Eggs, Normandie
Mix in a saucepan one and a half tablespoons melted butter with two tablespoons flour, pour in one and a half gills milk, a half gill cream and mix on fire until it comes to a boil. Plunge six freshly opened oysters in boiling water for three minutes, drain and cut in small square pieces and add to sauce, with six cooked shrimps cut in very small pieces and six finely sliced canned mushrooms. Season with half a teaspoon salt, saltspoon cayenne and tablespoon sherry, mix well and let boil for five minutes. Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast, pour sauce over eggs and serve.
A cream sauce enriched with shellfish, poured over poached eggs on toast. The measurements are Edwardian but straightforward; the timings are the part to ignore.
- The hinge: stop cooking the oystersBetween the three-minute blanch and the five-minute boil in the sauce, the oysters cook for eight minutes and turn to rubber. Blanch them just until the edges ruffle, about 30 seconds, or skip the blanch entirely and slip the chopped oysters into the finished sauce off the heat for a minute.
- GillsA gill is half a cup. One and a half gills of milk is 3/4 cup; half a gill of cream is 1/4 cup. Total liquid is one cup, which with 1 1/2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour gives a medium sauce that coats.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. A quarter teaspoon of cayenne in one cup of sauce is assertive; start with an eighth if you want the shellfish to read.
- Cooked shrimpsSix small cooked shrimp, peeled. Buying them raw and poaching them yourself for two minutes gives better texture than pre-cooked, which is usually already overdone.
- Canned mushroomsCanned mushrooms were widely available and commonly called for in cookbooks of this period, and gave a soft, faintly metallic note. Fresh cremini sliced thin and sautéed in butter until dry is closer to what the sauce wants.
- SherryA tablespoon of dry or medium sherry, not cream sherry. Add it near the end so the alcohol cooks off without boiling away the aroma.
- Sequence and holdingMake the sauce first and hold it warm with a lid or a film of butter on the surface, then poach the eggs and toast the bread. Poached eggs go cold and firm quickly; the sauce forgives waiting, the eggs do not.
- YieldTwelve eggs on twelve pieces of toast serves six as a lunch or supper course, two eggs each. One cup of sauce spread over twelve eggs is a modest anointing; double the sauce if you want it generous.
Anything called Normandie or à la normande in a turn-of-the-century kitchen signals the dairy and shellfish of Normandy: butter, cream, cider or calvados, oysters, mussels, shrimp. The classical sauce normande of the French repertoire is a fish velouté with mushroom and oyster liquor finished with egg yolk and cream, while the oysters, shrimp and mushrooms belong to the normande garnish of the dish rather than to the sauce itself, and this dish is essentially that garnish transposed onto a simple milk-based béchamel and pressed into service for eggs. Filippini's International Cook Book works this way throughout: a French sauce name, an Americanised method, and a canned ingredient or two to make it possible in a household without a fish stock always on the stove. The reliance on oysters is itself a period marker — they are often said to have been more plentiful and less costly then, and in dishes of this kind they seem to be treated as a flavouring as much as a luxury, chopped small and stirred into sauces the way one might use bacon today.