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Scrambled Eggs, Mckay
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl with a half gill sweet cream. Season with half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper; sharply beat up for a minute. Place two gills of tomato sauce in a frying pan and reduce on the fire to a half gill. Drop in the eggs, add one teaspoon fresh butter and constantly stir with a wooden spoon for six minutes. Remove from the fire and equally divide over six freshly prepared buttered toasts, arranged on a hot dish, and serve.
A tomato-scented scramble on toast, built on a reduced sauce rather than added liquid. The measurements are in gills and saltspoons, and the six minutes of stirring only works over gentle heat.
- Gills and saltspoonsA gill is half a cup, so a half gill of cream is 1/4 cup and two gills of tomato sauce is 1 cup, reduced down to 1/4 cup. A saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making the pepper a half teaspoon in total.
- The hinge: low heatSix minutes of constant stirring is only sensible over low heat, where the curd stays soft. Over a brisk flame the same eggs will be dry and weeping in two. Pull the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone; carryover heat finishes them on the way to the toast.
- What "tomato sauce" means hereNot ketchup and not a garlicky pasta sauce, but the plain cooked tomato sauce of the period: sieved tomato simmered with a little stock and butter. Passata or a smooth canned tomato purée reduced by three quarters gives the right thickness and concentration.
- Reduce before the eggs go inThe point of cutting 1 cup down to 1/4 cup is to remove water. Skipping the reduction leaves the eggs loose and pink-grey rather than glossy and coral-coloured.
- The panUse a heavy nonstick or well-seasoned skillet, or a small saucepan. Acidic tomato in a bare cast-iron or aluminium pan will pick up a metallic edge, and the wooden spoon the recipe specifies is still the right tool for keeping the curd large.
- Butter placementThe teaspoon of butter goes in with the eggs, which is early by modern habit; a second knob stirred in off the heat will loosen and enrich the finished eggs if they have tightened.
- YieldEight eggs across six toasts makes six light first-course or breakfast portions, not six full plates. For four people as a main breakfast, keep the same eggs and use four larger slices of toast.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era of the great hotel and club kitchens, where dishes were routinely named for the patron who first ordered them or the figure they were meant to flatter — hence a plain tomato scramble arriving as "Scrambled Eggs, McKay" alongside dozens of similarly christened eggs, sauces and garnishes. The identity behind such names is usually unrecoverable, and in most cases the attribution is better read as menu convention than as biography. What the recipe does document precisely is the professional handling of eggs around 1900: cream beaten in for tenderness, a sauce reduced separately so no water dilutes the curd, a wooden spoon rather than a whisk to keep the texture coarse, and toast buttered and waiting on a heated dish. Eggs served on a foundation of fried or toasted bread were standard restaurant practice, since the bread absorbs the sauce and keeps the portion from spreading across a cold plate.