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Poached Eggs, St. Jean
Prepare six fish cakes, arrange on a dish, place a poached egg on top of each, pour a cream sauce over, evenly divided, and serve.
An assembly recipe rather than a method: it assumes you already know how to make fish cakes, poach an egg and mix a cream sauce. The whole thing depends on timing, since all three components want to be hot at once.
- What the fish cakes areThe recipe does not say. In a book of this period a plain "fish cake" most often means salt cod flaked and bound with mashed potato, seasoned, shaped into flat rounds and fried in shallow fat. Fresh cod or haddock, poached and flaked, works the same way; if using salt cod, soak it with several changes of water until most of the salt is gone -- overnight or longer, depending on how hard it is.
- Cream sauceNot cream poured over. This means a white sauce: 2 tablespoons butter, 2 tablespoons flour, 1 to 1 1/2 cups scalded milk or half milk and half cream, cooked until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Keep it slack enough to pour, as it thickens on standing.
- The hinge is the eggsPoach them last, in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, about 3 minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Lift onto a towel to drain before setting them on the cakes, or the water thins the sauce underneath.
- Hold the cakes hotFried fish cakes toughen if they are held long in the oven. Fry them, drain on paper and keep them barely warm for no more than ten minutes while you finish the sauce and eggs.
- YieldSix cakes and six eggs serves three as a lunch or supper dish, six as a first course. The sauce quantity above is enough for six.
- ServingThe recipe says "arrange on a dish", i.e. a single platter rather than individual plates. Warm the dish first; a cream sauce skins over quickly on a cold plate.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), an alphabetical compilation, and much of it reads like the shorthand a chef would jot for his own kitchen brigade rather than instructions for a domestic cook. The combination of cod cakes, poached egg and cream sauce may belong to the wider tradition of Lenten and Friday cookery, where preserved cod and eggs stood in for meat, though the recipe itself does not say so. Salt cod was still an everyday staple in American cities at the time, sold in wooden boxes, and turning yesterday's fish and potato into a fried cake was ordinary household economy long before it became a restaurant course.