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Poached Eggs with White Wine
Have a quart of water in a saucepan with a teaspoon salt, the juice of a sound lemon and one gill white wine, and when it briskly boils carefully crack in six fresh eggs and poach for three minutes. Carefully remove them with a skimmer, neatly trim and place them on three freshly prepared toasts. Poach six more in a similar way, arrange them on three other toasts and serve very hot.
A simple French-style poach, distinguished only by the acidulated, wine-scented water. Two things want adjusting: the vessel size and the word "briskly."
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fl oz. Use a dry white with real acidity — Muscadet, Sauvignon Blanc, dry Riesling — since the wine is doing the same work as the lemon.
- Do not boil brisklyThis is the hinge. A rolling boil shreds the whites into rags. Bring the water to a boil to season it, then drop it to a bare simmer with only a few bubbles breaking, and slip the eggs in there.
- Pan size and batchingA quart of water in an ordinary saucepan is too little and too deep for six eggs at once. Use a wide sauté pan or shallow braiser with about 2 inches of water, scaling the salt, lemon and wine to keep the same proportions, and poach three or four eggs at a time.
- Three minutesCorrect for a set white and a liquid yolk on large eggs, timed from the moment the water returns to a tremble. Four minutes gives a jammy yolk; beyond five you have lost the point of the dish.
- Freshness matters more than technique"Six fresh eggs" is the working instruction. Older whites have thinned and will spread no matter how careful the water is. Crack each egg into a small cup first and tip it in close to the surface.
- Trimming"Neatly trim" means shearing off the ragged skirt of white with a knife or the edge of the skimmer once the egg is out. Blot on a clean towel first, or the toast turns to paste.
- The toastsSix slices, cut to roughly the size of the eggs and toasted dry rather than buttered heavily — a wet poached egg on soft buttered bread collapses into mush.
- YieldTwelve eggs on six toasts: two eggs each for six as a first course, or three servings of four as a lunch dish. The original divides the work into two batches of six without saying why.
Poaching eggs in acidulated water is old kitchen arithmetic: acid speeds the setting of the outer white so it wraps the yolk instead of feathering away, and vinegar was the usual agent in nineteenth-century English and American manuals. Substituting lemon juice and white wine, as here, does the same chemical job while leaving a cleaner flavor and no vinegar smell. Filippini's International Cook Book (1906) came out of his years at Delmonico's in New York, and this entry has the shape of professional service writing: a fixed poaching liquor, a fixed count of eggs, toasts cut and ready before the eggs go in, and the closing insistence on "very hot," which is the one thing a dining room could ruin. Poached and shirred eggs were common early courses on hotel menus of the period, cheap to plate and quick to turn out.