The Chafing Dish should be more than half full of boiling water. Break each egg separately into a saucer and slip it steadily and dexterously into the Chafing Dish. Light the lamp, cover up the water and eggs, and put the dish over the lower hot-water pan, which should have in it a pint of hot water. Let it heat until the whites of the eggs are set; then remove the eggs from the pan with the special flat implement ad hoc. Put the eggs on rounds of toast. Sprinkle them with pepper, salt and parsley, and put a tiny piece of butter on top of each egg.
Scrambled Eggs.
Beat up three eggs, whites and yolks, in a bowl, and add a pinch of salt. Put a good tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish, over a pan of hot water. When the butter sizzles, pour in the eggs, and stir with a wooden spoon very briskly for a minute and a half to two minutes, keeping the eggs from adhering to the sides and bottom of the Dish. Have rounds of toast ready, and pour the eggs on to them. Dust them with Paprika and parsley.
It is easy and pleasant to vary plain scrambled eggs with a dozen odds and ends. Asparagus tips, for instance, bacon dice, tiny slicelets of ham, green peas, thin rounds of Brunswick sausage, broad beans, chicken livers, button mushrooms, tomatoes, or chopped nasturtium leaves. All these should be added, cooked of course, towards the end of the stirring operation, and just before serving. Many other ingredients might be suggested, but the ingenious innovator will be able to think these out for himself, and he can always christen his invention scrambled eggs à la quelque chose to please his own fancy and flatter his friends.
Omelettes.
An omelette should not be too lightly undertaken. There are few things more tricky, more unreliable, more human, in a sense, than an omelette. You may make it a dozen times with perfect success. It will be light, frothy, ethereal, almost gossamer-like in its impalpable fairyhood. The thirteenth time you proceed on precisely the same lines, use the same material, and in every way follow the same formula, and the result is chaos. If there be a sex in cookery, omelettes must be essentially feminine.
This is how to make an omelette. Beat three eggs lightly with two tablespoons of milk, a little salt and pepper. Put one tablespoon of butter in the Chafing Dish over the hot-water pan, and when sizzling hot, pour in the eggs. You must hold the dish in the left hand, and rapidly scrape away with a knife the cooked egg where it seems to adhere, letting the liquid portion follow the knife. It should be cooked in less than fifty seconds if the water beneath it is boiling. Then gently, but firmly, slip the knife under the left-hand edge of the omelette and fold it over rapidly and neatly to the side of the dish opposite the handle. Have a very hot plate ready; reverse it on to the dish, turn the latter over the former quickly, and the omelette will (or should) rest on the plate.
Of course all this sounds very easy, but it needs knack and practice—lots of both. When entirely successful, however, it is most gratifying and self-flattering. You feel a real cook at last, and look upon Ude, Carême, Francatelli, and the other great names of history as brothers. All Chafers go through that pleasant period when all goes right and nothing goes wrong. Sometimes it lasts quite a while; but at last, sooner or later, there comes a moment when we know we feel that we know how little we know. As at golf, when we never play so well as during our first month, even so is it with Chaffinda.
The testing of eggs should not rightly be one of the Chafer’s duties. He should be able to rely on his purveyor. The best eggs I ever had in London were provided by an old landlady who told me that she got them twice a week from the country. When I asked her what county they came from, she said, “They come all the way from Clapham Junction, sir!” Anyhow, they were remarkably good, and I have been served with less reliable ones in country farmhouses. This was possibly for the same reason that one can rarely get fish at the seaside until the London train comes in.
Eggs en Cocotte.