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Scrambled Eggs, Reforme
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper and sharply beat them up for a minute. Cut in julienne shape four gherkins, six heads canned mushrooms, half ounce cooked ham and a very small truffle. Place these ingredients in a large frying pan with a tablespoon butter and gently cook for three minutes; pour in the beaten eggs with a tablespoon sherry, mix a little with a wooden spoon and let cook for six minutes, briskly mixing meanwhile. Remove, dress on a dish and serve very hot.
A Reform garnish folded into scrambled eggs. The one thing to watch is the timing: six minutes of brisk stirring will give you dry, granular curds unless the heat is very low.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — 1/4 cup for eight eggs. That is a generous but workable amount; it slows the set and helps keep the curds soft.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is half a teaspoon of pepper. With modern pre-ground pepper that is assertive; a quarter teaspoon of freshly ground is closer to the intent.
- The six minutesSix minutes only works over low heat with constant stirring, French-style, producing small creamy curds. Over medium heat the eggs will be firm in two to three minutes. Pull them while they still look slightly underdone — carryover heat finishes them on the dish.
- Cook the garnish first, then cool the panThe garnish goes in over gentle heat for three minutes to warm through and take up the butter. Let the pan drop in temperature before the eggs go in, or the bottom sets before you can stir.
- Canned mushroom headsSix whole button mushrooms from a can, drained and cut into matchsticks. Fresh buttons work but release water; sauté them dry before adding the other garnish, or the eggs will weep.
- GherkinsSour pickled gherkins (cornichons), not sweet gherkins. Blot the julienne dry — pickle brine in scrambled eggs curdles the texture and reads as sharp rather than piquant.
- TruffleThe recipe specifies only 'a very small truffle'; in practice this would have been a black truffle, fresh or preserved. A jarred preserved truffle, or a few drops of truffle-infused oil stirred in off the heat, is the practical substitute. Truffle oil added during cooking loses most of its aroma.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main course or six at a mixed breakfast table. The recipe says to serve it very hot; a warmed dish helps, as this mixture goes cold quickly.
The name points to the Reform Club in London and to the garnish generally credited to Alexis Soyer, the club's chef in the 1840s: julienne strips of ham or tongue, gherkin, mushroom, truffle and hard egg white, first attached to the breadcrumbed lamb cutlets still served as cotelettes de mouton à la Réforme. Here, in a collection of the sort Filippini and his contemporaries were compiling at the turn of the twentieth century, the garnish appears detached from the cutlet and applied to an egg dish. The sherry and the truffle mark this as hotel and club cooking rather than domestic breakfast fare — the sort of dish written for a kitchen that already had cooked ham, canned mushrooms and a truffle in the larder.