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Eggs Poached in Mazola
Pour enough Mazola in a frying pan, to barely cover the bottom, and heat. Break the eggs, one at a time, into a saucer, slide into the Mazola, dust with salt and cook so slowly that the egg will not be browned about the edge. Baste the yolk occasionally with a little of the hot Mazola.
This is a branded promotional recipe, and "poached" is doing unusual work: nothing here touches water. What the method actually produces is a basted fried egg, the ancestor of what diners later called eggs over easy without the flip.
- Mazola is corn oilMazola was a refined corn oil, introduced by the Corn Products Refining Company. Any neutral high-smoke-point oil behaves the same way here; the recipe reads as it does because the book was written to sell the brand.
- The hinge is low heatThe whole point of the instruction is an egg with no browned, lacy edge. Keep the pan at medium-low, and if the white bubbles vigorously the moment it lands, pull the pan off the burner for a few seconds before continuing.
- How much oil'Barely cover the bottom' works out to roughly 2 tablespoons in a 10-inch skillet, though the book gives no measure. Much less than that and there is nothing to spoon over the yolk.
- The saucerCracking each egg into a saucer first lets you check for shell and broken yolks and slide the egg in flat rather than dropping it. Worth doing even now; a small bowl or ramekin works identically.
- Basting sets the topTilt the pan slightly so the oil pools, then spoon it over the yolk occasionally as the egg cooks, as the recipe directs. This films the yolk opaque while leaving it liquid, and takes the place of covering the pan.
- TimingNo time is given. Expect roughly 3 to 4 minutes at genuinely low heat for a set white and runny yolk. Salt goes on early per the original, but salt landing directly on the yolk will speckle it, so aim at the white.
- YieldThe recipe gives no yield. Do not crowd the pan — three or four at a time in a 10-inch skillet, or the whites merge and the temperature drops.
Mazola corn oil appeared in the United States in the early 1910s, and cookbooks like this one were published by the manufacturer to teach cooks what to do with a bottled vegetable oil at a time when butter, lard and suet were the assumed fats in an American kitchen. That accounts for the odd insistence of the writing: every recipe names the product, and the product replaces something the reader already had. Calling a basted fried egg "poached" was not unusual at the time; period cookbooks sometimes used "poached" for an egg cooked out of its shell without stirring, whatever the medium.