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Scrambled Eggs, Swiss
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and briskly beat with fork a minute. Cut in exceedingly small square pieces two ounces lean, raw salt pork and two slices sandwich bread. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, add pork and neatly brown for three minutes, then add the bread and toss on fire until a nice golden colour; drop in the eggs, add quarter teaspoon very fresh chopped tarragon and cook for six minutes, briskly stirring frequently, Add two tablespoons grated Swiss cheese, stir a little, pour into a deep hot dish and serve.
A hearty scramble built on salt pork, croutons and Gruyère. Two things need attention: the old measures, and the six-minute cooking time, which will overshoot badly on a modern burner.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) for eight eggs. That is a generous amount of liquid; it gives a soft, loose curd rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Two of them is 1/2 teaspoon white pepper, which is a lot of pepper by current taste — start with half that and adjust.
- Salt, and the porkTwo ounces of salt pork will carry its own salt into the pan, and the cheese adds more. The half teaspoon of salt in the eggs can be cut or dropped entirely. If your salt pork is very heavily cured, blanch the dice for a minute and pat dry before browning.
- The six minutesSix minutes of brisk stirring over an older stove is not six minutes over a modern gas or induction burner. Cook over medium-low and pull the pan when the eggs are still visibly wet and glossy — usually three to four minutes — because they will keep setting in the hot dish.
- Cheese off the heatStir the grated cheese in at the very end, ideally with the pan off the burner. Swiss cheese held over direct heat throws its fat and turns stringy; residual warmth is enough to melt two tablespoons.
- Which Swiss cheese"Swiss" in an older cookbook of this kind most likely means Emmental or Gruyère, not the mild pre-sliced supermarket product. Gruyère grates better and has more to say against the salt pork.
- The bread"Two slices sandwich bread" cut in exceedingly small squares makes something like a cup and a half to two cups of fine croutons. Day-old bread browns better than fresh; fry it until genuinely golden and crisp before the eggs go in, or it will soften into paste.
- TarragonA quarter teaspoon of fresh chopped tarragon is a deliberately light hand — tarragon dominates eggs quickly. Dried tarragon is a poor substitute here; use half the quantity or leave it out.
- YieldEight eggs with pork, bread and cheese serves four as a main breakfast dish, or six alongside other things.
The "Swiss" label in such cookbooks often signals nothing more precise than the presence of Emmental or Gruyère, the two cheeses most American readers would then have recognised as Swiss; the technique here — beaten eggs slackened with milk and scrambled with fried bread and cured pork — is closer to a French brouillade than to anything specifically Alpine. Cookbooks arranged as tours of the world's kitchens frequently attached a national adjective to an otherwise conventional dish on the strength of a single ingredient, and this scramble would be a fair example. The measures are the dating detail: gills and saltspoons were still in use in American kitchens before the cup-and-spoon system was fully settled, and the call for raw salt pork, browned in the pan, reflects a period when salt pork was a household staple rather than a specialty purchase.