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Scrambled Eggs, Plain
Carefully break eight fresh eggs in a bowl. Season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper, add half gill cold milk. Briskly beat up with a wooden spoon for one minute. Thoroughly heat in a small saucepan half ounce butter, then drop in the eggs, gently stir with a wooden spoon, while briskly cooking for six minutes. Turn them on a hot dish and serve very hot.
A plain hotel-kitchen scramble, written for a cook who already knows the pan. The measurements are the only real obstacles.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 1/4 cup — about 2 tablespoons per four eggs. That is a generous but not excessive amount of liquid.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern standards; a quarter teaspoon is closer to current taste. White pepper was the usual choice in eggs of this period, conventionally because it leaves no dark flecks, though the recipe does not say so.
- Half an ounce of butterOne tablespoon, for eight eggs. That is lean by modern habit, where more butter is common; the extra fat is insurance against sticking and gives a softer curd.
- "Briskly cooking for six minutes"The hinge of the dish. Six minutes over brisk heat will give firm, dry, broken curds — the period preference. For a creamy scramble, drop the heat to medium-low, keep the spoon moving, and pull the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone; carryover heat finishes them.
- Wooden spoon, small saucepanThe recipe calls for a small saucepan and a spoon rather than a whisk or spatula, which keeps the egg in curds rather than shredding it. A nonstick or well-seasoned pan of similar size does the same work.
- Beating for one minuteLong enough to break the eggs up completely, which is the point — a plain scramble should be uniformly yellow, not streaked with white. Do not beat so hard that it foams.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield; eight eggs would reasonably serve about four as a main breakfast dish, more alongside other things. Warm the serving dish; the instruction to serve very hot matters.
The International Cook Book came out of the professional American hotel and restaurant world of the early twentieth century, where a "plain" version of a dish was commonly printed first as the base from which garnished variations followed, each assuming the reader had mastered this page. The style of cooking here is French in method, and the six-minute brisk scramble suggests a period preference for eggs cooked through into distinct firm curds rather than the loose, custardy scramble later favoured. The choice of a wooden spoon in a small saucepan rather than a fork in a wide skillet points to professional practice.