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Scrambled Eggs with Smoked Beef Tongue
Crack eight fresh eggs in a bowl, add a half gill milk, half teaspoon salt, two saltspoons white pepper, and sharply beat up with fork for one minute. Cut two ounces smoked beef tongue in quarter-inch pieces, place in a sautoir with two tablespoons melted butter, and cook on a brisk fire for two minutes, tossing meanwhile. Drop in eggs and cook for six minutes, briskly mixing quite frequently, pour into a deep, hot dish and serve.
A straightforward hotel-kitchen scramble, written for a cook who already knows the pan. Two things need translating: the measurements and the heat.
- Half a gillA gill is half a cup, so half a gill of milk is 2 fluid ounces — a quarter cup for eight eggs. That is a modest amount and will not make the curds watery.
- SaltspoonsA saltspoon is a quarter teaspoon, so two saltspoons of white pepper is half a teaspoon. That is assertive but deliberate; white pepper was preferred here so no black flecks show in the pale eggs.
- SautoirA straight-sided sauté pan, not a sloping skillet. Any wide, heavy pan works; nonstick makes the constant stirring easier and lets you keep the butter to two tablespoons.
- Brisk fireHigh heat, called for while the tongue cooks. The recipe does not say to lower it, but six minutes of brisk heat on eight eggs gives dry, granular curds, so drop to medium-low once the eggs go in.
- The hinge: stop earlyTake the pan off the heat while the eggs still look slightly loose. Residual heat in the pan and in the deep hot dish will carry them further, and the recipe's own instruction to serve into a heated dish makes that unavoidable.
- Smoked beef tongueSold cooked and sliced at some delicatessens and kosher butchers, rarely at supermarkets. Pastrami or a firm smoked ham cut in quarter-inch dice behaves the same way; two ounces is a seasoning quantity, not a filling.
- BeatingA full minute with a fork is a long beat, and that appears to be the point — it breaks the whites completely so the finished eggs are uniformly yellow rather than streaked.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a breakfast or supper dish, three if it is the whole meal.
Smoked and pickled tongue was ordinary butcher's stock in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when whole beef heads were broken down for sale and nothing was discarded; a cooked tongue kept well, sliced cleanly, and turned up in sandwiches, on cold buffets, and — as here — chopped small to lift a plain egg dish. Recipes of this kind belong to the professional hotel and restaurant repertoire that Alexander Filippini and his contemporaries codified for American kitchens: precise weights, a named pan, a stated number of minutes, and a garnish drawn from whatever the larder already held cured. The pattern of scrambled eggs plus a small quantity of a salty smoked meat runs through the period's cookbooks in dozens of variations, with ham, bacon, chipped beef, or smoked salmon standing in the same place on the page.