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Scrambled Eggs, Ecossaise
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, and beat up with fork for one minute. Remove the skin and bones from two ounces of smoked salmon, then cut it in quarter-inch-square pieces. Prepare six fresh toasts, trim to two inches in diameter, lightly butter and arrange them on a hot dish. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a sautoir, add the salmon, cook for one minute, tossing well meanwhile, then drop in the eggs; cook for six minutes, frequently stirring at the bottom, remove, dress the eggs evenly over the toasts and serve.
A straightforward scramble, but the proportions and the six-minute cooking time both need reading in context.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — about 60 ml for eight eggs. Heavy or single cream both work; the point is richness, not volume.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is about half a teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive for eight eggs; start with half that if you are using freshly ground black pepper.
- SautoirA straight-sided shallow sauté pan. Any wide non-stick or well-seasoned pan of 9–10 inches does the job; the wide base is what lets the curd cook evenly.
- Six minutes, and whyThe recipe asks only for frequent stirring at the bottom and does not state a heat level; six minutes over a low flame with steady stirring gives French-style soft, small curds rather than the dry flakes of a hot fast scramble. On a modern burner keep the flame low and pull the pan off while the eggs still look slightly underdone; residual heat finishes them.
- The salmonTwo ounces of smoked salmon for eight eggs is a seasoning, not a filling. Cold-smoked salmon is already cured and needs no cooking; the minute in butter is only to warm it and scent the fat. Hot-smoked salmon flakes rather than dices and can be folded in at the end instead.
- The toastsThe original toasts the bread first and trims the rounds afterwards; cutting two-inch rounds with a cutter or a glass before toasting is easier, and day-old bread cuts cleanly. Warm the serving dish, since egg on cold toast goes limp fast.
- YieldSix rounds, which reads as six small plates or three as a proper breakfast course. The eggs will not hold; assemble and serve at once.
"Écossaise" is French kitchen shorthand for "Scottish," and in the classical repertoire it can signal smoked salmon, as here, though the same adjective is also attached to garnishes built on barley or on a brunoise of vegetables. The label reflects the standing of Scottish cured salmon in the grand hotel kitchens of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the fish was smoked in the fishing towns of the north and shipped south to London and Paris as a luxury. The recipe's structure — a garnish named for a country, dressed on trimmed toast rounds, timed to the minute — belongs to the professional kitchen of the Escoffier era, which worked from a repertoire of named garnishes. Naming a dish for a place in this tradition rarely means it was eaten there; it means the kitchen was flagging which classical garnish to reach for.