Home › The World's Kitchen › Scrambled Eggs on Anchovy Toast
Scrambled Eggs on Anchovy Toast
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill cream, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper; sharply beat with fork one minute. Evenly spread a tablespoon anchovy butter on six freshly prepared slices of toast, dress on a dish, heat a tablespoon melted butter in a frying pan, drop in the eggs, cook six minutes, frequently mixing meanwhile; dress eggs over the six slices of toasts, evenly divided, and serve.
A straightforward breakfast dish; the only real question is heat control and the anchovy butter.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons (2 fl oz) for eight eggs. Heavy or light cream both work; the fat is there to slow the coagulation.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is roughly a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is about half a teaspoon of pepper. That is assertive by modern standards on top of salted anchovy butter — start with less.
- Anchovy butterNot sold in most supermarkets. Mash 4-6 oil-packed anchovy fillets (or 2 teaspoons anchovy paste) into 4 tablespoons softened butter. The text reads as a single tablespoon for all six slices, which is very thin; a tablespoon per slice is probably what is wanted, but the recipe does not say so.
- Six minutes is the hingeThat timing only makes sense over genuinely low heat with constant stirring. On a modern burner at medium, eight eggs will set hard and weep in under three minutes. Keep the pan barely warm and pull the eggs while they still look slightly underdone.
- Beat one minute, no moreA fork for a minute blends without whipping in much air, which keeps the curds soft rather than souffléed and then collapsed.
- Toast first, eggs secondThe toast is buttered and plated before the pan goes on for a reason — scrambled eggs will not wait, and anchovy butter should be melting into warm toast as the eggs arrive.
- YieldSix slices, eight eggs' worth of scramble spread between them: six modest servings, or four generous ones.
Anchovy butter was a fixture of Anglo-American cookery from the mid-nineteenth century onward, one of a family of compound butters — maître d'hôtel, ravigote, shrimp — that a professional kitchen kept made up in a cold larder and used to season fish, steaks and toast at a moment's notice. Its appearance under a plain scramble reflects the savoury end of the Edwardian breakfast and supper table, where salted fish did the work that hot sauce and cured meats do now. The International Cook Book (1906) was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and the terse imperative style here — crack, spread, dress, serve — is characteristic of the book throughout.