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Scrambled Eggs with Chervil
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill cream, leaves from three branches very fresh chervil, a half teaspoon salt, three saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for one minute. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in sautoire, drop in eggs and cook for six minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile, dress on a deep hot dish and serve.
A French-style scramble, soft and creamy rather than fluffy. The whole thing hinges on low heat and constant stirring.
- Half a gill of creamA gill is half a cup, so half a gill is 4 tablespoons — 1/4 cup. Use heavy or whipping cream; the fat is what keeps the curd tender.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is about 1/4 teaspoon, making this 3/4 teaspoon of white pepper for eight eggs. That is assertive by current taste; a quarter of that is closer to modern seasoning, and you can add more at the table.
- SautoireA straight-sided sauté pan, not a curved skillet. A 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned pan does the same job for eight eggs.
- Six minutes means low heatEight eggs set in under two minutes over a brisk flame. The six-minute timing only makes sense over gentle heat, which is the point: slow cooking with continuous stirring gives small, glossy curds instead of dry sheets. Pull the pan while the eggs still look slightly underdone — they carry on setting off the heat.
- BeatingOne minute with a fork is enough to combine without whipping in air. This is not an omelette; volume is not wanted.
- ChervilDelicate, faintly anise-scented, and hard to find fresh outside farmers' markets. It bruises and fades fast, so add it as written rather than cooking it long. Flat-leaf parsley with a few tarragon leaves is the usual stand-in, though it is sharper than the real thing.
- ButterA single tablespoon for eight eggs is thin. Two or three tablespoons, plus a knob stirred in at the end off the heat, is common in modern versions and helps stop the curd tightening.
- YieldServes four as a first course or light lunch, three as a main breakfast plate. The instruction to use a deep hot dish matters: shallow china cools loose eggs almost instantly.
Chervil is one of the four herbs of the French fines herbes, alongside parsley, tarragon and chives. The vocabulary of the original, sautoire and dress on a deep hot dish, is professional kitchen language of the kind found in American cookbooks written by Continental-trained chefs such as Alexandre Filippini around the turn of the twentieth century. Chervil never took hold in the English-speaking market the way parsley did; it wilts within a day or two of cutting and loses its perfume when dried, so it remained largely a garden herb and a restaurant herb. The slow, stirred, cream-enriched scramble described here is still the classic French treatment.