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Poached Eggs, Trovatore
Finely chop four sweet red peppers and place in a small frying pan with a teaspoon butter and three saltspoons salt. Cook for five minutes, gently tossing meanwhile. Prepare twelve round pieces of toast, two inches in diameter and a quarter inch thick, lightly butter. Evenly spread the sweet peppers over the toast. Place on a hot dish. Prepare twelve poached eggs and place over the toast. Reduce two gills of tomato sauce to half the quantity on the fire. Arrange a very thin slice of truffle over each egg, pour the sauce and sprinkle a little chopped parsley over and serve.
A garnished poached-egg dish of the Delmonico school, built for a hot platter and immediate service. Everything but the eggs can be ready in advance; the timing hinge is that the eggs go on toast that is already spread and plated.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so two gills of tomato sauce is one cup, reduced to half a cup. A saltspoon is about a quarter teaspoon, making three saltspoons roughly three-quarters of a teaspoon of salt for four peppers.
- Sweet red peppersThese are ripe red bell peppers or pimientos, not chillies. Five minutes in butter softens a fine dice but will not cook out the raw edge of thick-walled modern bell peppers; a longer, gentler sweat, or jarred pimientos drained and chopped, gives the soft spreadable texture the recipe assumes.
- The toast roundsTwelve rounds two inches across and a quarter inch thick means bread cut with a cutter, not sliced bread trimmed square. Toast them dry first, then butter, so the pepper and sauce do not soak through before service.
- Poaching twelve eggsPoach in batches into barely trembling water and hold them in a bowl of warm salted water while the rest cook, then drain each on a cloth before setting it on the toast. Water carried over from the pot will flood the plate and dilute the sauce.
- Reducing the sauceHalf a cup of finished tomato sauce reduced from a cup should coat the back of a spoon and be seasoned after reduction, since halving the volume doubles the saltiness of what is already there.
- TruffleA thin slice of black truffle was standard restaurant garnish in this period and is the single most expensive element now. A sliver of preserved truffle, or nothing at all, is more honest than truffle oil, which is usually flavoured with a synthetic aroma compound rather than the fungus.
- YieldTwelve rounds, one egg each; the recipe gives no serving count, so portion it as you like. Assemble and serve at once; poached eggs on toast will not wait.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when American hotel and restaurant cookery was written in French terms and dishes were christened after operas, singers and patrons. Trovatore points to Verdi's Il trovatore of 1853, still a repertory staple in the years around 1900, and the name signals nothing about the ingredients beyond a fashionable Italian gesture — red peppers and tomato in place of the usual Hollandaise or Mornay of an egg garnish. Naming eggs after operas seems to have been a house habit rather than a tradition with a fixed formula, and the same title can attach to different dishes in different books. What the recipe does document is the shape of a professional egg course of the period: a small buttered crouton, a soft garnish, one poached egg per crouton, a reduced sauce and a truffle slice on top, repeated a dozen times down a hot dish.