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Scrambled Eggs with Bacon, Country Style
Cut a two-ounce piece lean raw bacon in very thin pieces, place in a sautoire with teaspoon melted butter and gently fry five minutes, stirring meanwhile. Carefully crack eight fresh eggs on the bacon, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper. Set in oven five minutes. Remove, then mix eggs and bacon well with a spoon. Dress on a deep hot dish and serve.
A terse professional formula from a chef's book: the eggs are set in the oven rather than stirred over direct heat, then broken up at the last moment. It works, but the pan and the oven heat need translating.
- SautoireA shallow straight-sided pan with a long handle — a modern 10-inch skillet or sauté pan does the job. It must be ovenproof, since the pan goes straight from burner to oven.
- SaltspoonA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two of them is half a teaspoon of pepper for eight eggs. That is assertive but deliberate; halve it if you want the eggs rather than the pepper forward.
- Oven heatThe recipe gives no temperature. A moderate oven — around 350F — should set eight eggs in a shallow pan in roughly five minutes; hotter and the bottom layer risks turning rubbery before the tops go opaque.
- The hingeDo not stir until the eggs come out of the oven. The point of the method is that the whites just set while the yolks stay loose, so the single mixing at the end gives large soft curds bound with liquid yolk rather than uniform fine crumbs.
- Lean raw baconTwo ounces is roughly two thick slices. Much modern bacon is wetter and more heavily sugared than the leaner cured bacon the recipe seems to have in mind; render it slowly and pour off any excess fat before the eggs go in, or the finished dish may be greasy.
- The teaspoon of butterIt may be there because lean cured pork gives up very little fat. With fattier supermarket bacon you can usually omit it.
- Carry-over cookingEggs continue to firm in a hot pan. Take them out while they still look underdone, and mix and plate immediately — the "deep hot dish" is called for so the curds hold their heat at table, not so they keep cooking.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously, or three as a main course with toast.
Alexander Filippini spent decades in the kitchens of Delmonico's in New York, and The International Cook Book (1906) reads like a chef's notebook: no yields, no oven temperatures, no encouragement, just the sequence of operations in the order a cook would perform them. The "country style" label appears to mark this as a rustic treatment set against the same book's more elaborate egg dishes — the bacon and eggs cooked together in one pan and broken up roughly, rather than the eggs being finished separately with cream and the bacon laid alongside. Setting the pan in the oven rather than stirring over a flame gives a softer, moister result. Filippini's use of sautoire and dress is untranslated French shop-talk, a reminder that American fine dining at the turn of the century still ran on the vocabulary of the French brigade.