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Eggs Florentine
On a bed of cooked and seasoned spinach place eggs which have been poached. Pour over white sauce No. II seasoned with grated Parmesan Cheese. 6 eggs 6 tablespoons liquid
A three-line assembly recipe that assumes you already own the book's sauce chart. Everything hinges on the eggs and the sauce being ready at the same moment.
- White sauce No. IIThe numbered sauces are in a chart elsewhere in the book, which is not reproduced here; in many books of the period the numbers run from thin to thick, so No. II is likely the medium sauce. A medium white sauce is roughly 2 tablespoons butter and 2 tablespoons flour cooked together, then 1 cup milk whisked in and simmered until it coats a spoon. Add the grated Parmesan off the heat so it melts without stringing.
- The "6 tablespoons liquid"This line is genuinely ambiguous as printed. It reads as a quantity note carried over from the book's sauce or serving table rather than an instruction, and there is no way to tell from the page alone whether it refers to poaching water, extra milk for the sauce, or the spinach's own liquid. Treat the sauce quantity above as the working figure.
- PoachingBarely simmering water with a splash of vinegar, eggs slid in from a cup, 3 minutes for a set white and liquid yolk. Lift them onto a towel to drain, or the water thins the sauce on the plate.
- The spinachCook it, then squeeze it hard. Wet spinach is the usual failure here: it releases water under the eggs and the sauce slides off. About 2 lb fresh spinach, or 20 oz frozen leaf spinach thawed and pressed, gives six firm beds. Season with salt, pepper and a little nutmeg.
- Timing the assemblyHave the spinach hot and the sauce hot before the eggs go into the water. Poached eggs will not wait, and reheated ones firm up.
- Browning, if you want itThe original serves it sauced and unbrowned. If you prefer a glaze, a minute or two under a hot broiler is enough; a full bake in the oven overcooks the yolks.
- YieldSix eggs serves three as a light main course or six as a first course.
Anything called à la florentine in French kitchen usage means served on spinach, and the association is traditionally traced to Catherine de' Medici, who is said to have brought Florentine cooks and a taste for spinach to France in the sixteenth century -- a story repeated far more often than it is documented.