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Scrambled Eggs with Anchovies
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, season with three saltspoons salt and two saltspoons pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for a minute. Cut six anchovies in oil in very small pieces, place in a sautoir with a tablespoon butter, thoroughly heat, then drop in the eggs and cook six minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, dress on a deep dish and serve.
A plain French-style scramble, stretched with milk and sharpened with anchovy. The only real decision is heat: six minutes is a long time for eggs unless the pan is barely warm.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (60 ml) for eight eggs. That is a generous amount of liquid and will give a soft, loose curd rather than a firm one.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. Three saltspoons is 3/4 teaspoon salt and two is 1/2 teaspoon pepper. Cut the salt to a pinch or leave it out entirely — six anchovy fillets carry plenty on their own — and the pepper to a quarter teaspoon unless you want it assertive.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not a sloped skillet. Any wide, heavy pan works; nonstick makes the stirring easier and the pan easier to clean afterwards.
- Six minutes means low heatThis is the hinge. Eggs cooked six minutes over medium heat are dry and granular. Set the burner low, stir more or less continuously with a fork or spatula, and pull the pan off while the eggs still look slightly underdone — they carry on setting in the dish.
- The anchoviesSix oil-packed fillets, drained and chopped fine. Warm them in the butter until they slump and dissolve into it, a minute at most; browning them turns the flavour harsh and fishy rather than savoury.
- Dressing on a deep dishWarm the serving dish first. Loose scrambled eggs sent to a cold plate stiffen at the edges and weep in the middle.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a breakfast or light supper dish, three if it is the whole meal. Buttered toast is the usual accompaniment.
Anchovy was the standard savoury seasoning of the Anglo-French kitchen well before this book was printed — as paste, as essence, as bottled sauce, and as fillets cured in salt and repacked in oil. Cooks reached for it the way a modern kitchen reaches for soy sauce or fish sauce: a small amount melted into butter gives depth without announcing itself as fish. Combinations of egg and anchovy turn up across nineteenth-century breakfast and supper tables, from anchovy toast under a poached egg to this kind of scramble, and they belong to the same taste for salty, pungent "relishes" that produced devilled kidneys and potted meats. The instruction to beat the eggs "sharply" for a minute and then cook them slowly with constant stirring is the classic French method, which the author would have taken for granted.