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Poached Eggs, Swiss
Cut from a loaf of sandwich bread twelve pieces quarter-inch thick and round to two inches in diameter. Lightly toast and spread a very little butter over. Cut twelve thin slices rich Swiss cheese about the same size as the toasts and lay a slice on each toast. Set them in the oven on a tin for five minutes, or until well melted. Remove and keep warm.
Prepare twelve poached eggs. Lay them over the toasts. Heat in a small saucepan half gill white wine with two saltspoons cayenne pepper, adding one and a half ounces very finely grated Swiss cheese; briskly stir on the fire until thoroughly melted, evenly divide over the twelve eggs and reset the pan in a brisk oven for two minutes. Remove, place on a large hot dish and serve.
A fondue-style sauce poured over poached eggs on cheese toasts. The whole thing lives or dies on the sauce, which is cheese and wine with nothing to stabilize it.
- The hinge: keep the wine sauce below a simmerGrated Swiss melted into wine will break and turn stringy if it boils. Warm the wine, then add the cheese in small handfuls off direct heat, stirring until each addition is smooth. A quarter-teaspoon of cornstarch tossed with the cheese, as in Swiss fondue, is cheap insurance.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 2 fluid ounces, 4 tablespoons. Use a dry white with acidity — a Fendant, Chasselas or a dry Riesling — since acid helps the cheese emulsify.
- Saltspoons of cayenneA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two is half a teaspoon of cayenne in four tablespoons of liquid. That is fierce by modern palates; a quarter teaspoon over twelve eggs is closer to what most cooks want.
- Brisk oven'brisk' is usually taken to mean a hot oven, somewhere in the range of 400-450F. Two minutes at that heat is only to glaze the top; any longer and the yolks set and the sauce breaks. The earlier melting of the cheese slices wants no more than a moderate oven.
- "Rich Swiss cheese"In 1906 this means Gruyère or Emmental, not the rubbery deli slices sold as Swiss in the United States. Gruyère melts more smoothly and carries the wine better. The grated portion is 1½ oz, about a packed half cup.
- Sandwich breadA close-crumbed white pullman loaf, cut a quarter-inch thick and stamped into 2-inch rounds. Toast lightly only — a hard crouton will not yield to a spoon under a poached egg.
- Poaching twelve eggsPoach ahead into cold water, trim the ragged whites, then reheat for 30 seconds in hot salted water and drain well on a towel. Wet eggs will thin the sauce on contact.
- YieldTwelve rounds serves four as a lunch or supper dish, six as a first course. Assemble at the last minute; it does not hold.
This comes from Alexander Filippini's The International Cook Book (1906), which set out dishes from many countries for American households in a period when hotel and club cookery was the main channel through which European food reached them. The dish is essentially a fondue sauce — Swiss cheese melted into white wine — repurposed as a coating for poached eggs, a move typical of the era's egg cookery, in which a single poached egg on toast was dressed with whatever sauce named the dish: B e dictine, Florentine, Portugaise, Suisse. Naming it "Swiss" signals the cheese and the wine rather than any documented Swiss original; melted-cheese cookery in Switzerland is generally traced to the Alpine cantons, but the plated egg-on-toast format is a restaurant convention. Filippini himself was long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the recipe's tidy dozen rounds and "large hot dish" read as service for a table rather than a family supper.