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Poached Eggs, Virginia
Broil six even, very thin slices of Virginia ham for one minute on each side, remove and place on a hot dish. Prepare twelve poached eggs, but without toasts, lay over ham and serve.
Two lines of instruction that assume you already know how to poach an egg and that you have a country ham hanging in the pantry. The whole dish turns on the salt of the ham against a soft yolk.
- What "Virginia ham" meansA dry-cured, salt-heavy, often smoked country ham — Smithfield style — not the wet-cured pink deli ham sold as "Virginia ham" today. If you can find real country ham, buy it sliced thin as biscuit ham; ordinary cooked ham will work but gives a much milder, wetter result and will not need the same restraint with seasoning.
- "Broil" hereIn 1911 American usage this is direct high heat, over coals or under a hot broiler; a dry skillet or grill pan (pan-broiling) will stand in. Country ham slices should be paper-thin, and the recipe's minute a side is about the limit — much longer and the salt concentrates and the edges turn to leather.
- Do not add fat or saltCountry ham renders enough of its own fat and carries all the salt the plate needs. Season the eggs lightly or not at all and taste before you reach for the shaker.
- "Without toasts"The phrase points back to Filippini's standard poached-egg preparation, which set each egg on toast. Here the ham takes the toast's place, so skip it — the instruction is a cross-reference, not an omission.
- Poaching the eggsBarely simmering water with a splash of vinegar, eggs slipped in from a cup, three minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Twelve eggs are best done in two batches and held in a bowl of warm water while the ham goes on the heat, since the ham cools fast.
- YieldSix servings — one slice of ham and two eggs each. As written it is a breakfast or supper dish and wants nothing more than the hot platter it is served on.
- If the ham is very saltySome traditionally cured country ham is aggressively salty. Soaking or blanching the slices briefly before broiling will draw out some of the salt and does no harm to the dish.
Alexander Filippini, long the chef at Delmonico's in New York, built The International Cook Book (1911) as a large alphabetical collection of dishes, and the American entries lean heavily on the few native products that had genuine prestige abroad — canvasback duck, terrapin, and Virginia ham. Ham from the Tidewater country, salted, smoked and aged for months, was among the American cured meats that hotel menus named by place of origin, and Smithfield hams were being shipped to English tables well before the Civil War. Serving eggs on ham rather than on toast is a small piece of restaurant logic: the salt-cured meat does the work of seasoning and structure at once, in the same family of thinking that produced eggs Benedict, a dish often traced to New York hotel dining rooms of the same era, though its origin is disputed.