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Scrambled Eggs with Sausage
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add one gill cold milk, season with half teaspoon salt and two saltspoons white pepper. Sharply beat up with a fork for two minutes.
Cut two country sausages into quarter-inch slices and place in a frying pan with half ounce butter; gently brown for two minutes, then drop in the eggs and thoroughly mix with a wooden spoon, while slowly cooking for five minutes. Remove, dress on a hot dish and serve.
A straightforward diner-style scramble from the era when eggs were cooked slowly and served soft. Two details need attention: the archaic liquid measure and the fact that the sausage gets very little time on its own.
- A gillHalf a cup, or 4 fluid ounces. That is a generous amount of milk for eight eggs and will give a loose, custardy scramble; cut it to a quarter cup if you want firmer curds.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two means half a teaspoon of white pepper. That is assertive by modern taste — start with a quarter teaspoon and adjust.
- Country sausagesFresh, uncured coarse pork sausage, sold in bulk or in links, not the cured or smoked kind. Two minutes of gentle browning will not reliably cook raw pork through, so brown the slices properly first -- six to eight minutes, until firm and cooked to 160F at the centre -- then add the eggs.
- The hingeFive minutes of "slowly cooking" is the whole technique. Keep the heat low and keep the spoon moving; the eggs should thicken into soft folds and be pulled off the heat while still glossy, since they carry on setting on the hot dish.
- Half ounce butterAbout one tablespoon. With country sausage rendering its own fat you may not need all of it; add more only if the pan looks dry.
- BeatingTwo minutes with a fork is a long beat by modern habit; it does at least disperse the milk fully through the eggs before they meet the pan.
- YieldEight eggs and two sausages serve four as a breakfast dish, three if it is the only thing on the table.
Scrambled eggs with sausage is a plain everyday egg dish, the kind of thing a hotel or restaurant kitchen could turn out quickly for a guest wanting breakfast rather than cuisine. Several habits in it belong to the professional kitchen of the period: beating the eggs with milk, cooking them slowly with a wooden spoon, and "dressing" them on a heated dish. "Country sausage" was generally understood in America to mean fresh, unsmoked pork sausage, commonly seasoned with sage and pepper and sold loose or in links by a local butcher. The instruction to serve on a hot dish is worth taking seriously, since soft eggs cool and stiffen quickly on a cold plate.