Is There a Nutmeg in the House? (22 page)

Masterclass
, 1982

Poached Eggs

Over the years I think that I have received more pleas for advice on the technique of poaching eggs than on any other aspect of cookery, with the possible exception of how to get the brûlée part on crème brûlée. But that’s another story.

In his book,
A Complete System of Cookery
, published in 1759, William Verral put the matter in, one might say, an eggshell.

‘Be sure the eggs are fresh; for, from the experience I have had, I am sure it is not in the power of the best cook in the Kingdom to poach stale ones handsome, notwithstanding they may come all whole out of the shell.’

There you have it. To produce neat, plump, well shaped and comely poached eggs it is essential to start off with fresh eggs. Not
too
fresh though. A really new-laid egg is not a good subject for poaching. The white separates too easily from the yolk. Three-day-old eggs are the ideal, although how, unless one keeps hens, one is ever to know the exact age of an egg is not a problem I can solve. But, like many people who live in big towns, I find that it pays to go to some trouble to discover a shop where the supply
of eggs is limited, and the turnover rapid, so that one can always be reasonably sure that the eggs are fresh. And when friends arrive from the country with their own fresh eggs I find that the best way to ensure a few days’ supply of nicely poached eggs is to cook them immediately and keep them in a bowl of acidulated water in the refrigerator. This is a most successful system. With the help of Parmesan cheese, breadcrumbs, butter and fresh parsley or tarragon, possibly a little cream, or freshly made tomato sauce, or chopped spinach, delicate and appetising little poached egg dishes can be produced for lunch in a few minutes.

Here is the method. Apart from the fresh eggs – for poaching choose small ones whenever possible – a certain knack is needed. It is one which is easily acquired, but until the simple technique has been mastered it is advisable not to attempt to poach more than two or three eggs in one go.

Utensils required are an ordinary saucepan of 1½-2 litre/3–4 pint capacity and with a cover, a long-handled perforated metal spoon, a bowl and a couple of small cups or saucers. I find that a timer is also indispensable.

Three-quarters fill the saucepan with water, bring this to simmering point, add a tablespoon of wine vinegar. Break the eggs into the cups or saucers, slide them into the gently simmering water. Count thirty. Turn off the heat. Quickly, with the edge of your metal spoon, roll each egg over once or twice. This sounds dangerous but – always provided that the eggs are in the right condition – I assure you that it works. If any of the white of the eggs has separated and floated to the surface, skim it off.

Now cover the saucepan and leave the eggs for three minutes.

Have ready a bowl of cold water to which you have added a few drops of wine or tarragon vinegar.

With your perforated spoon lift out the poached eggs and drop them gently into the cold water. This immediately arrests the cooking, so that when you come to reheat the eggs they will still remain tender and soft. Any trimming of the whites which may be necessary can be done at a later stage.

Cover the bowl and store the eggs on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. If not used within two or three days, renew the slightly vinegared water and return the bowl to the refrigerator.

A week is the maximum time I have stored poached eggs in this manner.

Notes

1. I find that it is not very practical to make more than one batch of poached eggs without boiling fresh water and vinegar. The water becomes cloudy, and requires much skimming, and often the second or third batch of eggs looks messy. So the sooner one can acquire the knack of poaching several eggs at a time in a large pan, the quicker it will be to poach say half a dozen eggs, so often called for in those recipes which start off by telling you in such a wonderfully carefree way to ‘have ready ten nicely poached eggs’.

2. No matter how fresh eggs may be, some are just better than others – plumper, with whites which coagulate more perfectly, so sometimes it is not necessary to turn the eggs over in the water. One sees that the whites have of themselves formed a beautiful, shapely covering for the yolks.

3. Some cooks use a shallow sauté pan rather than a saucepan for the poaching of eggs. I find that it matters little which is used. Possibly a sauté pan is best for a quantity of eggs, a saucepan for just two or three. Just as for scrambled eggs, omelettes, fried eggs and boiled eggs, the choice of pan is a matter of personal preference. Any law laid down would be arbitrary.

Masterclass
, 1982

TORTILLA – SPANISH OMELETTE

A Spanish tortilla is a thick, unfolded omelette, consisting only of eggs, potatoes and seasonings. It is cooked in olive oil, should be compact and have almost the appearance of a cake, can be eaten hot or cold, and makes a splendid picnic dish, especially for a car journey. A big tortilla will keep moist for three days.

The following recipe, in note form, is exactly as I wrote it down while watching Juanita, the village girl who once cooked for Anthony Denney in his house in the province of Alicante. The notes seem to me to convey the essential points about making a tortilla more vividly than would a conventional recipe, and I have used them often without in any way altering the method, except to cook the potatoes rather more gently than Juanita did – she was never a patient girl.

About 500 g (i lb) of potatoes for 4 eggs.

Potatoes all cut up small. Soaked in plenty of water (like for gratin Dauphinois).

Cooked in olive oil (she lets it smoke) in shallow earthenware dish directly on butagaz. Tiny piece of garlic. Stirred fairly often, and pressed with flat, iron spatula-spoon. Salt. In the end the potatoes are almost in a cohered mass. If any pieces too big she cuts them as they cook with her iron implement.

She beats the eggs in a bowl, tips in the potatoes (slightly cooled; they have been transferred to a bowl) and mixes them well.

The tortilla is cooked in an iron omelette pan with smoking oil. It puffs up. She holds a deep plate in her left hand and turns the tortilla into it. Then back into the pan. And process repeated (sometimes twice, it depends if she is satisfied with its appearance).

Notes

As a tortilla is a very filling dish, I find that half Juanita’s quantities, i.e. approximately 250 g (½ lb) of potatoes and 2 eggs make enough for two or three people. It is of course easier to handle in this smaller form, for which I use an iron pan of 20-cm (8-in) diameter, measured at the
top
. For a 4-egg tortilla use a 22-cm or 24-cm (8/½-in or 9/½-in) pan.

For the initial cooking of the potatoes I still use a Spanish earthenware dish over direct heat, as did Juanita (it is a delicious way of cooking potatoes, and need not necessarily be reserved for the tortilla) although an ordinary frying pan serves perfectly well.

About that spatula-spoon: this is a characteristic Spanish kitchen implement, a round flat pusher, as it were, with a long handle, used mainly when the paella is cooking, and just right for moving the rice and other ingredients around in the pan. I use a thin wooden spatula or palette knife instead.

Really fresh eggs are necessary for a tortilla. Stale ones don’t puff up, and so produce a flat omelette.

Recipe recorded at La Alfarella, 1964

CHEESE PUDDING

This is a very old English dish and a very useful one. Something like a soufflé, but quicker to prepare and better tempered, it
can
be kept waiting. And precise timing is not important. I think it was probably devised in the days when coal-burning kitchen ranges were so temperamental, and when hot dishes were required to withstand the long journey from country house kitchens to dining-rooms. It’s just as good and useful nowadays when, although most of us take our food straight from the oven to the table, everybody needs dishes which demand little preparation, and without anything very difficult in the way of ingredients.

You need 180 g (6 oz) of any decent English cheese – Cheddar, Cheshire, Double Gloucester, Leicester, Wensleydale, Lancashire (don’t use processed cheese. It simply doesn’t taste of cheese), 2 tablespoons of dried breadcrumbs, just over 300 ml (½ pint) of cold milk, 2 large or 3 average whole eggs, 1 teaspoon of made mustard – French or English, plenty of freshly milled pepper, salt, cayenne if you have it. The dish to use is either an ordinary English pie dish of 900-ml (1½-pint) capacity or a soufflé dish of the same capacity. If I’m making the pudding in double quantities, I prefer to use two, side by side in the oven, rather than one large one. They don’t have to be buttered.

Put the breadcrumbs into the dish, pour the milk over them. Stir in the grated or chopped cheese and the seasonings. Not too much salt but the amount depends on the saltiness of the cheese used, so taste as you go.

Separate the eggs, beat the yolks very thoroughly, stir them into the cheese mixture. Whisk the whites to a stiff froth. Stir a spoonful or two into the cheese mixture, then tip in the rest, lifting and folding with a metal spatula or a spoon, as lightly and quickly as possible.

Put straight into the centre of the preheated oven, 180°C/350°F/ gas mark 4 and cook for 25–30 minutes. The top of the pudding should be well risen, golden and spongey. Leave it for 5 minutes or so before serving. By that time the inside should be rather like a thick creamy custard. Enough for 3.

Notes

1. If it happens to be convenient, the main ingredients of the pudding – the breadcrumbs, cheese, milk and seasonings – can all be mixed in the dish well ahead of time. Only the eggs need to be
added just before cooking. While you are doing this heat up the oven.

2. Borrowing an idea – a rather expensive one – from the Swiss cheese fondue, a liqueur glass of Kirsch can be added to the mixture. This gives a delicious flavour, but if you use it leave out the mustard. Another alternative, if you like the taste of caraway, is kümmel, or just a teaspoonful of the seeds or cumin seeds if you have them.

3. If possible serve fingers of crisp toast, preferably from brown bread, with the pudding.

4. In the twenty or so years I’ve been using this recipe (I published it in an article in the
Sunday Times
in October 1955) it has failed me only once. That was when I made triple quantities, using one very large soufflé dish, and got the timing wrong. So what my guests ate on that occasion was cheese and egg soup. Hence my preference for two small dishes rather than one large one. The same applies to soufflés.

This version written in 1970s

One William Verral

At Halland, in Sussex, one of the country estates of that Thomas Pelham-Holles, Duke of Newcastle, who was for thirty years Secretary of State and who finally came unstuck over the loss of Minorca and his contemptible part in the Admiral Byng affair, one William Verral was the young assistant to St-Clouet, the Duke’s French cook. Halland is some ten miles from Lewes, where Will Verral was born and where in due course he succeeded his father as master of the White Hart Inn (the place was also Pelham property) and, in 1759, published a book called
A Complete System of Cookery
. It is one of the most diverting and outspoken in the history of English cookery writing.

Like all cooks who undertake the catering for special occasions in other people’s houses, Verral invariably found the kitchen equipment placed at his disposal totally inadequate – and didn’t hesitate to say so in print. In the house of one of the ‘best families hereabouts’ he finds, typically, a larder crammed with ‘a vast plenty of good provisions’, enough for a dinner of ten or twelve
people; so having made the routine tactful approach to the resident cook – she is called Nanny – he asks to be shown the apparatus, as he calls the kitchen battery; all Nanny can produce are ‘one poor solitary stewpan’ and a frying-pan ‘black as my hat and a handle long enough to obstruct half the passage of the kitchen’. Verral wastes no time. He sends to the inn for his own equipment and gets to work on his initial preparations. Presently he asks Nanny for a sieve and when she gives it to him infuriates her by complaining that it is gravelly. Nanny blames the housemaid. ‘Rot our Sue, she’s always taking my sieve to sand her nasty dirty stairs.’ She gives the sieve a thump on the table, rinses it in a cauldron in which pork and cabbage are boiling and hands it back. It is now coated with pork fat. Verral rejects it – Nanny flounces off to the scullery fuming about fussy men cooks – ‘There was no more sand in the sieve than would lay upon a sixpence’ – and Verral has to wheedle her back into good humour by showing her how to cut up chicken for a fricassee.

Later in the evening, the dinner having proved a success, the company stays on for supper, and the host asks for another fricassee. Ever tactful, Verral supervises the making of it by Nanny, waits until the gentlemen, by that time fairly mellow one supposes, declare it even better than the one they had for dinner, and sends Nanny to the dining-room to take credit and the tip. Not unexpectedly, the master of the house presently decides to install more suitable equipment, Nanny is on the way to becoming a more civilised cook, and Verral goes on to tease more of the Sussex citizenry about the meanness and squalor of their cooking arrangements. In one house he finds the kitchen fireplace reduced to the size of a salt-box – just to save coals – and the master of the house ignorant of the meaning even of the word stove. Verral strides off, the gentleman pursuing. Verral shall have
carte blanche
to order whatever he wants.

A good agent for the local Sussex ironsmiths, our Verral; he appears to have been for ever calling them in to install new stoves and kitchen equipment; and at Anne of Cleves House in the Southover district of Lewes, given to the Sussex Archaeological Society in 1925 by a latter-day member of the Verral family, can be seen a wondrous collection of local kitchen machinery – cradle-spits, fan-spits, clockwork spits, bottle-jacks, heat-driven and weight-driven spits, chimney-cranes to hoist the iron pots and kettles which were too heavy to lift by hand, and an iron
salamander for browning the top surfaces of dishes such as crème brûlée, a perfect little brute to wield single-handed. One sees what those female cooks and servant girls were up against – with that kind of equipment to cope with, sheer physical strength would have been the very first requisite of a cook.