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Scrambled Eggs with Parsley
Prepare the eggs, but while beating up the eggs add one tablespoon finely chopped parsley.
This is a one-line variation that assumes you already have the book's basic scrambled egg method in hand. Everything worth saying is about the base technique and how the parsley behaves in it.
- What "prepare the eggs" meansThe line assumes the book's own basic scrambled egg entry, which is not reproduced here. A standard method of the period is eggs beaten with a little salt and pepper and cooked with butter in a pan over gentle heat, stirred constantly until just set; nothing in the parsley variation changes the base.
- ProportionsThe recipe gives no egg count, so the tablespoon is measured against whatever the base entry calls for; a tablespoon of chopped parsley is a modest amount for a half-dozen eggs. Too much wet herb can loosen the curd and dull the colour.
- Which parsleyCurled parsley was commonly used in this period; flat-leaf is the usual alternative today. Either works, but chop it fine and dry it well in a cloth first, or the moisture will loosen the eggs.
- Heat is the hingeLow heat and constant stirring. Egg proteins begin to coagulate from around 145F and the curd turns granular and weeping well before boiling, so the pan should never be hot enough to hiss when the eggs go in.
- Pull them earlyTake the pan off the heat while the eggs still look slightly underdone. Residual heat in the pan and in the eggs themselves carries them the rest of the way in the time it takes to reach the table.
- Adding the parsleyBeaten in at the start, as written, the parsley flavour goes right through. If you would rather keep the green sharp and distinct, hold back half and stir it in off the heat.
- ServingScrambled eggs do not hold; cook them at the moment they are wanted.
The International Cook Book (1906) is the work of Alexander Filippini, long associated with Delmonico's in New York, and it is built as a reference rather than a narrative: thousands of short numbered entries, arranged so that a cook could find a dish and its dozen variations at a glance. That structure explains why this entry is a single sentence. Filippini gives the plain scrambled egg once and then runs through the variants, each as a brief instruction hanging off the parent recipe. Parsley is often said to have been a common kitchen herb of the period in French and Franco-American cooking, cheap, available year-round and used more for freshness and colour than for any assertive flavour of its own. The terseness here reads less as carelessness than as the house style of a book of this kind.