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Scrambled Eggs, Bordelaise
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for one minute.
Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add four finely chopped shallots and gently brown for three minutes, pour in half gill claret and half gill demi-glace. Reduce on the range until nearly dry, then drop in the beaten eggs and cook for six minutes, frequently mixing with the wooden spoon meanwhile. Pour them into a hot, deep dish and serve.
A straightforward French scramble whose interest lies entirely in the shallot-and-claret reduction stirred through the eggs. Two of the measurements are period shorthand, and the six-minute cooking time only works over gentle heat.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — that much milk in the eggs, and the same quantity each of claret and demi-glace. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper, which is assertive but correct for this dish.
- The hinge: reduce until nearly dryThe shallots, wine and demi-glace must cook down to a thick, glossy film in the pan before the eggs go in. Any residual liquid will thin the eggs and they will weep in the serving dish.
- ClaretClaret is the English term for red Bordeaux. Use a dry red with decent acidity; nothing sweet or heavily oaked, since the volume is small and the flavour concentrates.
- Demi-glaceReduced brown veal stock, thickened and intensely savoury. Commercial demi-glace or glace de viande can be bought ready-made, though usually from specialist suppliers rather than an ordinary grocery; if using a concentrate, dilute it to a sauce consistency first rather than adding it as a paste.
- Six minutes means low heatFrench scrambled eggs of this era are soft, small-curded and almost saucy. Turn the heat well down before the eggs go in, stir more or less constantly, and pull the pan when they are still slightly looser than you want — they carry on setting in the hot dish.
- ButterA single tablespoon is scant for eight eggs by modern taste. Adding a further knob of cold butter off the heat at the end both enriches the eggs and stops the cooking.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a lunch or supper dish, or six as part of a larger breakfast. Warm the deep dish properly; a cold bowl kills the texture instantly.
"Bordelaise" in classical French cookery signals the presence of red Bordeaux and shallots, and usually a brown stock reduction behind them — broadly the same combination that flavours the steak sauce of the same name (which classically also carries bone marrow), here folded through eggs instead of poured over beef. The recipe also shows how casually a well-run kitchen of the period assumed a pot of brown stock reduction was simply on hand: what a modern cook buys in a tub was, to this author, an everyday byproduct of the stockpot.