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Scrambled Eggs with Onions
Carefully crack eight fresh eggs into a bowl, and a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons pepper, sharply beat with fork one minute. Heat a tablespoon melted butter in a sauteuse, add one medium, finely chopped onion, gently brown five minutes, then drop in the eggs and cook six minutes, frequently stirring meanwhile. Dress on a vegetable dish and serve.
A plain hotel-kitchen scramble, written in the measures of a professional American kitchen around 1900. Two things need translating: the volumes, and the cooking time.
- The hinge: six minutes is too longEight eggs stirred for six minutes over the heat that browned the onion will set hard and weep. Pull the pan to low heat before the eggs go in and stir for three to four minutes, taking them off while they are still glossy and slightly loose; carryover heat finishes them.
- Half a gill of milkA gill is half a cup, so this is 1/4 cup (2 fl oz) of milk for eight eggs. That is a generous amount of liquid, which may help explain the long cooking time; with a shorter cook it gives a soft, slightly custardy scramble.
- Two saltspoons of pepperA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so this is a full half teaspoon of pepper. Assertive by current taste, though not unreasonable against the sweetness of browned onion; start with half of it if you are unsure.
- SauteuseA shallow pan with sloping sides, roughly what would now be called a sauté or omelette pan. Any 10-inch nonstick or well-seasoned skillet does the job; the sloping sides matter only for stirring and turning out.
- Browning the onionFive minutes in one tablespoon of butter over moderate heat gives soft, lightly coloured onion rather than deep caramelisation. Chop it genuinely fine, or the pieces stay crunchy against the set egg.
- Dress on a vegetable dishA warmed shallow serving dish, the kind used for buttered vegetables at table. Warming it matters more than the shape, since scrambled eggs cool fast.
- YieldEight eggs serves four generously, or six as part of a larger breakfast.
The International Cook Book (1906) is generally credited to Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and its house style shows throughout: brisk imperative sentences, exact minute counts, and the professional measures of the period — the gill, the saltspoon, the sauteuse — set down as if for a line cook rather than a housekeeper. Eggs scrambled with onion need no particular pedigree; versions turn up wherever eggs and onions are cheap, from Jewish and Central European kitchens to the plainest American boarding-house breakfast. The book gathered recipes from many countries and was still willing to include something this ordinary, on the reasonable grounds that a cook needed to be told how long to stir.