Home › Fish, Eggs, and Sauces › Poached Eggs (Roumania and Turkey Make)
Poached Eggs (Roumania and Turkey Make)
(Roumania and Turkey.) Make a puree of 1 pound of cooked and chopped calves' liver, 1 cup or less of stock, parsley, pepper, and salt. Put this through a sieve, arrange on a dish, as a bed for 6 poached eggs, and pour around a sauce made of stock, flavored with capers or tarragon vinegar.
EGGS (as cooked in Nuremberg.).
Peel 4 hard-boiled eggs, dip them in batter, fry brown, dip and fry again, until twice the usual size. Serve with a sauce of tomatoes or on a bed of spinach, cooked and made into a paste.
FRIED EGGS (as cooked in Scotland).
Make a forcemeat of 1/2 cup of milk and equal parts of bread-crumbs and chopped ham, the yolk of an egg, and a little French mustard. Dip fried eggs in this, then fry again, and serve with a salad of watercress. EGGS (as cooked in Lyons).
Peel and slice 6 hard-boiled eggs. Make a sauce of 2 large white onions, chopped fine, 1 ounce of butter, add 1/2 pint of stock, parsley and seasoning. Pour this over the eggs, in a border of fried potatoes.
Four short egg dishes run together under one heading, each a national variation on the same idea: a cooked egg set on or in something richer than itself. They are written in the telegraphic style of the period, so quantities for the coatings and sauces need judgement.
- YieldEach of the four serves three to six as a light main course or supper dish. The liver puree with six poached eggs will feed three generously; the Nuremberg and Lyons versions, with four and six eggs, suit two to three.
- Calves' liverOrder it from a butcher; supermarket liver is usually beef or lamb, both stronger and coarser. Cook the liver gently until just firm and still faintly pink inside — overcooked liver turns granular and no amount of sieving will smooth it. Chop, then work through a sieve or a food processor with the stock added a little at a time until it is a thick, spreadable paste, not a sauce.
- The capers-or-tarragon sauceThis is simply stock sharpened and served loose around the plate. The recipe gives no quantity or type; a cup of stock reduced by half, then finished off the heat with a spoonful of chopped capers or a teaspoon of tarragon vinegar, tasting as you go, is a workable reading. Vinegar boiled hard goes flat and harsh.
- Frying eggs twice (Nuremberg)Dry the peeled hard-boiled eggs thoroughly or the batter will slide off. The batter is unspecified; a plain flour-and-egg batter of coating consistency works, fried at around 350F, then drained, cooled a moment, dipped and fried again. The doubling in size presumably comes from the second coat, since no leavening is mentioned.
- The Scottish forcemeatAs written this is very wet — half a cup of milk with breadcrumbs and chopped ham will not cling to a fried egg. Use the milk only to moisten the crumbs, squeeze them out, and bind with the yolk and mustard until the mixture holds its shape. This is the same coating logic as a Scotch egg, applied to an already-fried one, and it is fragile; chill the coated eggs before the second frying.
- MeasuresAn ounce of butter is 2 tablespoons. Half a pint of stock is one US cup. "A little French mustard" points to a smooth, Dijon-style mustard rather than an English one; a rounded teaspoon is about right for that quantity of forcemeat.
- The Lyons onionsThe point of the dish is sweet, thoroughly softened onion, so give them fifteen to twenty minutes over low heat in the butter before the stock goes in, and let the sauce reduce until it coats. Rushed onions leave the sauce thin and raw-tasting.
- PoachingFor the first dish, poach the eggs in barely trembling water with a splash of vinegar, three minutes for a set white and liquid yolk, and drain them on a cloth before setting them on the liver puree, which is thick enough to be spoiled by pooling water.
With a Saucepan Over the Sea belongs to a small genre of turn-of-the-century American books that gathered "foreign" dishes and labelled them by nation or city, aimed at cooks who read about European travel more often than they undertook it. The attributions are loose he of oeufs a la lyonnaise, where the onion is the marker of the style and turns up in everything from potatoes to tripe, while the Scottish entry is plainly a cousin of the Scotch egg, a coated hard-boiled egg whose earliest printed recipes are early nineteenth century (Rundell, 1809), though an eighteenth-century origin is often said to lie behind it. The Roumanian and Turkish liver bed reflects a genuine regional fondness for chopped and pureed offal, though the pairing with poached eggs and a caper sauce is more the compiler's arrangement than any single national tradition. What the page really records is the turn-of-the-century conviction that an egg was a canvas: hard-boiled, fried or poached, it was expected to arrive under a sauce, inside a coating, or on a bed of something else entirely.