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Scrambled Eggs, Williams
Break eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons pepper, one tablespoon shredded cocoanut, and beat up with fork one minute. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in saucepan, drop in the eggs and cook for six minutes, briskly mixing meanwhile.
Prepare six pieces of toast two inches square and one-quarter inch thick, spread a very little anchovy paste over each and arrange on a hot dish. Broil one minute on each side six thin slices lean bacon, place a slice on each toast, evenly divide eggs over and serve.
An Edwardian hotel breakfast dish: soft scrambled eggs on anchovy toast with bacon, with the odd flourish of shredded coconut in the egg. A few of the measures and one of the timings need translating.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup — about 60 ml of heavy or light cream for eight eggs. That is a generous amount and will keep the curds loose.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons is 1/2 teaspoon of pepper. With modern pre-ground black pepper that reads as aggressive; start with half and taste.
- The six minutesSix minutes of brisk stirring in a hot pan will give you dry, granular eggs. Use low heat, stir constantly, and pull the pan off while the curds are still glossy and slightly underset — the residual heat finishes them on the way to the table.
- CocoanutProbably unsweetened shredded or desiccated coconut rather than the sweetened flake sold for baking, though the recipe does not specify. A single tablespoon across eight eggs is a background note, and sweetened coconut would tip the dish.
- Anchovy pasteStill sold in tubes and unchanged in kind. "A very little" is the operative phrase: it is very salty, and it is doing the seasoning work alongside the bacon, so go light on added salt in the eggs.
- The croutesTwo-inch squares a quarter inch thick means bread cut thinner than a standard sandwich slice, trimmed, and toasted crisp so it does not go limp under the eggs. Cut them before toasting.
- The baconOne minute per side under a broiler suits thin, lean, old-style rashers. Modern thick-cut streaky bacon will need three to four minutes a side, or a skillet.
- YieldSix toasts from eight eggs — six modest portions as part of a larger breakfast, or three or four as a plated dish.
The International Cook Book was compiled by Alexander Filippini, long a chef at Delmonico's in New York. Its habit of attaching surnames to dishes — Scrambled Eggs Williams, and dozens like it — was common in American and French restaurant kitchens of the late nineteenth century; the usual explanation is that a regular customer's preferred garnish became a standing order and then a menu name, though that is tradition rather than anything documented for this dish. Who Williams was is not recorded in the book; the name survives, the diner does not. The coconut is the more telling detail. Grated coconut and sweet-savoury pairings of this kind were associated with the curry and chutney vocabulary of the colonial table, though the route by which coconut reached a dish like this is not documented. Anchovy paste on toast underneath belongs to the older English savoury tradition, doing the same job as it did in the Victorian dining room: a salt, funky base to carry something mild laid over it.