Home › The World's Kitchen › Scrambled Eggs, Compiegne
Scrambled Eggs, Compiegne
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, and briskly beat up with fork for a minute. Heat two tablespoons melted butter in sautoire, add a finely chopped onion and gently brown for three minutes, then add four well-cleaned, fresh mushrooms cut in small squares and briskly cook for five minutes. Stir well, drop in eggs, cook for six minutes, briskly stirring meanwhile, dress on a hot, deep dish, arrange six heart-shaped bread croutons around and serve.
A straightforward French-style scramble with a mushroom-and-onion base, written in Delmonico-era measures. The only real trap is the cooking time.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 4 tablespoons (1/4 cup) for eight eggs. That is a generous but workable ratio.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is usually reckoned at a quarter teaspoon, so three of them is about three-quarters of a teaspoon of white pepper. That is aggressive by modern palates; a quarter to a half teaspoon suits most modern tastes better.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, not a sloped skillet. Any 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan does the job; the straight sides simply make stirring eggs tidier.
- The six minutesSix minutes of brisk stirring will give you dry, granular eggs if the pan is hot. Work over low to medium-low heat, stir constantly, and pull the pan off while the curds still look slightly loose " they carry over on the way to the dish.
- Mushrooms first, and dryCook the onion and mushrooms until their liquid has evaporated before the eggs go in. Wet mushrooms will thin the eggs and prevent them from setting into curds.
- CroutonsThe recipe says only that they are heart-shaped bread croutons; cut them with a cutter or knife from white bread and fry them in butter until golden on both sides. Making them before the eggs is the easier order of work.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; eight eggs with garnish would reasonably serve about four as a lunch or supper dish, or more at breakfast alongside other things.
Compiegne is a town in Picardy, north-east of Paris. French classical cookery habitually names a dish for a place, a person or a patron, and such names often came to stand for a fixed garnish, though no standard 'Compiegne' garnish is documented; here the additions are onion and mushroom, with fried croutons around the rim. Filippini, long of Delmonico's in New York, arranged his work with an eye to national styles for American readers, and the egg chapters are where that is easiest to see: the same eight eggs reappear again and again, redirected by a handful of aromatics and a different place name. Heart-shaped croutons were a common garnish in nineteenth-century restaurant cookery, and their survival into a home cookbook says something about the aspirations of the readership.