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Scrambled Eggs with Artichokes
Break eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, half teaspoon salt, two saltpsoons pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for a minute. Cut three canned artichoke bottoms into quarter-inch-square pieces, place in a sautoire with two tablespoons melted butter and briskly fry for five minutes, tossing once in a while. Sprinkle two saltspoons salt over, drop in eggs and cook for six minutes, briskly and frequently stirring meanwhile, dress on a hot deep dish and serve.
A straightforward dish that turns on two things the original leaves unstated: the size of a saltspoon and how hot the pan should be. Everything else is a matter of translation.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup, or 4 tablespoons. That is generous for eight eggs and gives a soft, loose curd.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon. The recipe therefore uses about 1 teaspoon of salt in total (half at the beating stage, half over the artichokes) and 1/2 teaspoon of pepper, which is assertive but not excessive for eight eggs.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, wider than a saucepan and shallower than a stockpot. A 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet does the same job here.
- The hinge: heat and stirringSix minutes of brisk stirring only works over moderate-low heat. On high heat the eggs will be dry and weeping in half that time. Keep the pan just hot enough that the curds form slowly and pull the eggs off while they still look slightly underdone.
- Artichoke bottomsCanned artichoke bottoms are still sold, usually packed in brine; drain and pat dry or they will steam rather than fry. Quartered canned hearts, trimmed of the tough outer leaves, substitute directly. Three bottoms is roughly a cup diced.
- Frying the artichokesFive minutes in butter is meant to drive off moisture and brown the edges slightly, which is where the flavor comes from. Do not skip it or shorten it.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously as a main course, six as part of a larger breakfast. Warm the serving dish, as the recipe specifies, since scrambled eggs cool very fast.
The International Cook Book belongs to the era when a professional kitchen's repertoire was being written down for a domestic audience, and this dish shows the seam: the instructions use restaurant vocabulary (a sautoire, a dish to be dressed) for something a household cook could put together in ten minutes. Canned artichoke bottoms are the telling ingredient. Artichokes had long been a fixture of French and Italian cooking, but trimming a fresh one down to the bottom is slow, wasteful work; by the early twentieth century commercial canning was making prepared bottoms more widely available, and cookbooks of the period do call for them. Eggs scrambled with a cooked vegetable folded through them is a pattern found across southern Europe.