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Scrambled Eggs, Lakewood
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with a fork for one minute. Cut three ounces of raw beef marrow into small pieces, then plunge and keep in hot water for five minutes without boiling. Lift with a skimmer, chop up and evenly spread over six freshly prepared two-inch-square toasts. Dress on a hot dish, dredge a very little salt over each and keep in oven with the door open until required. Finely mince six peeled and cleaned fresh mushrooms and lightly fry in a pan with a tablespoon of melted butter for five minutes. Drop in the beaten eggs and cook for six minutes, frequently stirring briskly, arrange evenly over the six toasts and send to table.
A hotel-style scramble built on marrow toast, from a book written for cooks who had a warming oven and a butcher who would split bones on request. Two things need attention: the marrow, and the six-minute cooking time.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) for eight eggs. That is a generous amount and will give a soft, loose curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two saltspoons of white pepper is 1/2 teaspoon, which is assertive but deliberate in this style of cooking.
- Six minutes is too longEight eggs stirred briskly over direct heat for six minutes will be dry and grainy. Work over medium-low heat and pull the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone; they finish in their own heat on the way to the toast.
- Getting the marrowRaw beef marrow means the soft interior of a split leg bone, sold as marrow bones. Ask the butcher to saw them lengthwise, or soak cut bones in cold salted water for a few hours to loosen the marrow, then push it out. Three ounces is roughly what comes from two or three good bones.
- The hot-water stepMarrow held in hot water that never boils firms just enough to be chopped instead of smearing. If the water boils it melts and you lose it into the pot. Keep the water hot but well short of a boil and lift the pieces out with a slotted spoon.
- Mushrooms first, and dryMinced mushrooms release a lot of water. Fry them until that water has cooked off and the pan is sizzling rather than steaming, or the eggs will be watery when the two are combined.
- "Oven with the door open"This is a warming oven, not baking heat. The recipe names no temperature; use the lowest setting with the door ajar to hold the marrow toasts without cooking them further or drying them out.
- YieldSix two-inch toasts and eight eggs serve three generously, or six as a first course.
This is Alexander Filippini's kind of cooking: he was long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) is full of dishes named for the resorts, hotels and patrons of the Gilded Age dining room. Lakewood, New Jersey, was then a fashionable winter retreat for wealthy New Yorkers, and dishes tagged "Lakewood" in period hotel cookery generally signal a house garnish rather than any regional tradition. The marrow is the tell. Beef marrow on toast was a standard savoury of the late nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic, prized as a rich, mild fat that a cook could reportedly obtain from the butcher very cheaply, and it turns up as a foundation under eggs, on grilled bones, and spread beneath sauced meats. That it has largely vanished from home cooking says more about the decline of whole-carcass butchery in retail shops than about the ingredient.