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Scrambled Eggs with Cheese
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk with half teaspoon salt and three saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat with fork one minute. Heat a tablespoon butter in a frying pan, drop in eggs and cook four minutes, stirring with wooden spoon meanwhile; add a tablespoon grated Parmesan cheese and one tablespoon grated Swiss cheese, gently stir and cook lightly for two minutes, pour into a deep dish and serve.
A plain French-style scramble with two cheeses. The only real difficulties are the archaic measures and a pepper quantity that will startle a modern palate.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) of milk for eight eggs. That is a generous amount of liquid; it gives a soft, loose curd rather than a firm one.
- Three saltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, making 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper. That is heavy by current taste for eight eggs; a quarter teaspoon is closer to modern preference, with more added at the table.
- Heat is the hingeThe recipe gives four minutes of stirring plus two more after the cheese, which only works over low heat. On a modern burner at medium or above the eggs will set and weep long before six minutes. Keep the pan low and pull it while the curds still look slightly underdone.
- ButterOne tablespoon for eight eggs is lean, and modern nonstick aside, a stainless pan will want two. Butter should foam but not brown before the eggs go in.
- The cheesesA tablespoon each of Parmesan and Swiss is a seasoning, not a filling. Grate both finely so they melt in the last two minutes; coarsely grated Gruyere or Emmental will string rather than blend.
- Add cheese off the heat if unsureParmesan and Swiss both tighten the curd as their proteins set. Stirring them in with the pan barely warm, at the very end, keeps the eggs creamy.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a main breakfast dish, six alongside other things. The "deep dish" of the original is a warmed serving bowl, which matters more than it sounds: these eggs cool fast.
Scrambled eggs enriched with grated cheese sit in the long tradition of the French oeufs brouilles, cooked slow and soft and treated as a dish in its own right rather than a quick breakfast. Pairing a hard grating cheese with a melting one -- one for savor, one for melt -- is a familiar approach, though how standard it was across hotel and restaurant cookery of the period is not established here. The saltspoon and gill measures belong to an older system of household measurement that the standardized American cup and spoon were displacing around this time.