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Poached Eggs, Tomato Sauce
Prepare twelve poached eggs on toast. Place one and a half gills tomato sauce in a saucepan with a half teaspoon each anchovy essence and freshly chopped parsley and one saltpsoon cayenne, mix well and let gently boil for fifteen minutes. Drop in little by little a half ounce butter, briskly mix, pour over eggs and serve.
A brisk chafing-dish supper dish that assumes you already know how to poach an egg and finish a sauce. The only real technique is the butter at the end.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is a quarter-pint (5 fl oz) in British usage, though it is reckoned at 4 fl oz in America; one and a half gills is therefore somewhere between 3/4 cup and a scant cup of tomato sauce. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, which is a serious amount of cayenne in that little sauce — start with half and taste.
- The hinge: mounting the butterThe half ounce (1 tablespoon) of butter goes in a small piece at a time, mixed briskly, as the recipe says; it is safest added once the sauce is off the boil, since hard boiling after the butter is in tends to split it and leave a greasy film rather than gloss. The recipe itself does not specify taking the pan off the heat.
- Anchovy essenceA Victorian bottled seasoning of anchovy, vinegar and spice. Anchovy paste thinned with a drop of vinegar is the closest thing on a modern shelf; Worcestershire sauce or a spoon of colatura will also carry the idea, though both are saltier.
- Tomato sauce means the sauce, not ketchupIn a book of this period this is a cooked, sieved tomato sauce, unsweetened and already seasoned. Plain passata simmered down with a little onion and butter is the right register; jarred pasta sauce with garlic and herbs is not.
- Fifteen minutes of boilingThat length is there to reduce and concentrate 3/4 cup of sauce, not to cook anything through. Keep it at a bare simmer and watch it — at that volume it can tighten to a paste and scorch well before the time is up.
- Poaching twelve eggsPoach them a few at a time in barely trembling water, and slide the finished ones into a bowl of warm (not hot) water. They will hold there ten minutes while you make the sauce, and drain on a towel before they meet the toast.
- YieldTwelve eggs on toast serves six as a light lunch or supper, two eggs apiece. The sauce quantity is small by design — it is a spoonful over each egg, not a pool.
Poached eggs under a sharply seasoned tomato sauce belong to the vast repertoire of egg dishes that professional kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept on hand for luncheon, supper and the chafing dish, where a cook could ring many changes on the same poached egg by changing only the sauce. The anchovy essence is the period marker: bottled fish seasonings were a standard English store-cupboard item from the early 1800s, used much as cooks now use Worcestershire or fish sauce, to put a savoury bottom note under tomato or butter without announcing itself. Finishing a sauce by whisking in butter — the practice French kitchens knew as monter au beurre — is the whole point of the last line, and it is the step that separates this from tomato sauce poured on eggs.