Cousin Matthew, can you get over your obsession with ‘The Crown’? No I cannot, but this has nothing to do with the British Royal Family and everything to do with preserving my sanity. I have mentioned elsewhere that I make bagels and lox at least three times a week. Eggs Royale are just Eggs Benedict with salmon instead of Canadian bacon. Blessedly, it has no cream cheese and no capers, of which I’m not particularly fond. I suppose it’s called “Royale” because salmon is more expensive than Canadian bacon, which reminds me to ask, is that what it’s called in Canada itself? I don’t think so. Anyway, here goes.
2 English muffins, sliced in half
8 or 12 slices of smoked salmon, depending on thin the salmon is and how much you want
4 eggs, room temperature
A little vinegar
Some finely diced parsley, to show you are a Person of Good Breeding
Then, for the hollandaise sauce:
3 egg yolks
Some lemon juice, maybe 1 tbs.
A little Dijon mustard, maybe 1 tsp.
1 stick butter, melted in a microwave (shudder; one of the few times I ever use one, to melt butter)
You have to make either the poached eggs or the hollandaise first, unless you have help, and Lord knows I wish I did. I’ve done it both ways but I think I prefer making the hollandaise first.
In a stainless steel bowl (important: it has to be heat conductive) whisk the 3 egg yolks, the lemon juice, and the mustard until it gets good and frothy and starts to plump up. Put the bowl over a pot of simmering water, keep whisking, and s-l-o-w-l-y add the melted butter, whisk, whisk, whisk. When it thickens up and is even more plumped up remove from the heat, cover it, and stash it in the oven to keep it warm.
In a large frying pan or skillet add about 2 inches of water. Salt it. Get it boiling and add the vinegar and stir vigorously to create a whirlpool. This is kind of fun. Crack your eggs carefully into the whirlpool and try to time it so they don’t get plopped on one another. Reduce the heat to a simmer and let them go for 3 or 4 minutes, until the whites have congealed around their yolk. With a slotted spoon, move them to a plate lined with paper towel and dry gently.
Toast the halved English muffins and put 2 halves on each of 2 plates. Add 2 or 3 slices of salmon. Place a poached egg on each one. Dig out the hollandaise sauce and spoon that over the eggs. Sprinkle with the parsley. Whine to your dining companion that just once he could be taught how to poach an egg or handle a whisk. He will deflect and distract by opening a bottle of Prosecco if it is 11 AM or later.
That looks like the perfect breakfast. Can’t wait to try this.
There’s a little breakfast place in Manchester, VT called Up For Breakfast (it’s on the 2nd floor of the building) and they serve this. I get it most times I’m there because it is most excellent.
There’s not much point in my making this dish at home because Mrs. Butcher seems to have lost her taste for fish, which is a crime.
Airport Cafe in Hampton NH, does a Crab Cakes Benedict. Bonus small plane action.
Buy a small amount of smoked salmon, use it for yours. Make Mrs. Butcher’s with the Canadian bacon. Problem solved and breakfast served!
The insert image icon has been removed so I hope this works.
https://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7id3lmSPT1rr0110o5_250.gif
Sigh. It didn’t.
Let’s try this instead:
You make hollandaise sound not difficult and I am suspicious.
Hollandaise is not difficult, most sauces aren’t, once you get over your fear of trying them for yourself, and, in my case, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Mayonnaise wasn’t invented to be a postwar cheap sandwich spread, it’s something like two centuries old and you can make that yourself. I do, but mine is more like aioli and not pumped up with chemicals not found in nature so not shelf-stable and you can’t just leave it in a cabinet for 6 months. Look up what meunière is, and Béarnaise, and all kinds of things. I make pasta ragùs that take hours but it doesn’t require any skills, just patience and lack of distractions, like a job or children.
I’m working on writing up an FYCE recipe for, well, for whatever reason I’d never made it before. I was uncertain about it, consulted online wiser heads, and I was thrown a curveball. Béchamel? Well, that’s easy enough, God knows. I skipped right over that segment, to me that’s like some idiot blogger describing how to pour milk on dry cereal, but I’ll include it in my post.
That’s right, @MatthewCrawley, you just keep writing these delightful FYCE posts! (Pauses to crack the FYCE whip.)
I was going to consult you, Goddess of FYCE, about this recipe. First of all, I think it might have a very limited audience. Second of all, there’s a story around it that’s very long, but I’m going to add it as an appendage and spare the deadsplinterariat. It is the opposite of Cousin Mattie’s Kitchen Sweep; it was more like a Casa Encantada Kitchen Challenge/Dare. But it’s one of the best things I’ve ever made, and no, it doesn’t involve lamb or veal. I’ll work on it, you can review it, and determine whether it’s All The News That’s Fit to Print.
@MatthewCrawley, thank you for calling me Goddess of anything, I needed a boost. Any Cousin M story is a wonderful story, you are a natural raconteur. Best hot take: I read Encantada as Enciente and was giving you some side eye.
Enciente am I, it’s the casa that’s encantada. Since I think this thread is effectively closed and we’re moving on, I’ll tell you a funny story.
I was at a party years ago, a guest of a guest, Better Half was on some business trip, and I got chatting with these three guys. They were lovely, really bright and funny and accomplished. The party venue had a rooftop bar, that’s where we were, and one of them pointed in a direction and said, “That’s the building. Stop by any time!” And then the three of them left.
My friend wandered over and I asked, “Do you know those three guys I was just talking to? They were great and apparently one of them lives right there, in that building.”
“Oh yeah, I know. They’re a throuple.”
“A what?”
“You know, like a couple, but there are three of them. They’re very devoted to each other. They all live in that apartment.”
“Three of them…three men…how does that work?”
“Oh, it wasn’t easy, believe me. That’s a co-op building, so to get past the Board they formed an LLC and bought a 3-bedroom, but of course they only use one of them.”
“No, that’s not what I meant. I mean, like, operationally, sharing a bed, how does that work?”
“There are online videos, Mattie. I can send you links. You really can’t imagine how this might be, I don’t know, kind of exciting?”
“No, absolutely not. Being with Better Half is a lot of work as it is, the thought of having two Better Halves to deal with is too much.”
Only in your beloved city @MatthewCrawley is it more difficult to get a three bedroom love nest in a co-op building than it is to figure out where to put all the various parts. I bet they had fun trying!
I read enciente as enceinte and was very concerned about how that would impact your alcohol and deli foods consumption.
Heh. I got close to being part of a throuple once, though we never once called it that, and it didn’t work out in the end. I still wonder about how life would have been different.
Noone will ever know!
https://www.knorr.com/ca/en/knorr-products/knorr-classic-sauces/hollandaise-classic-sauce.html?bvstate=pg:2/ct:r
Yes they will. That shit tastes like a child’s chemistry set experiment gone wrong.
That shit tastes like a child’s chemistry set experiment gone wrong.
And still many people won’t know!
That’s fair.
“Some finely diced parsley, to show you are a Person of Good Breeding“…dying. Also, I try to forget how much egg is in a hollandaise – my God Cousin M, how is your cholesterol? Sadly, the carnivore will not eat eggs (or maybe luckily, as this is not a heart-healthy meal). You know what else is good for skillet-cooking eggs? Butter and white vermouth, one half tablespoon of each per egg.
Vermouth? To cook eggs?
@MemeWeaver, yup, yup, yup…melt the butter, plop your egg in to fry, pour the vermouth over the top of the egg. Spoon the mixture over the egg to soft cook it, or crank the heat up to crisp the edges of the white and deglaze the pan. Pour any leftover liquid over the egg – finish with minced herbs. Found this recipe in an old French cookbook – makes a fine egg.
Mon dieu. I might have to try this, but then I’d have to buy vermouth….
And gin…and olives…
These eggs are getting EXPENSIVE!
Oh yes! If you don’t mind cooking with alcohol sweet and dry vermouth is incredibly handy. It’s a fortified wine.
See, this is where real grass-fed eggs come in. They have a higher omega-3 count than salmon. Only industrially harvested eggs are bad. If you can find a local who raises their chickens in a pasture and only supplements with feed over the winter, then thems some good eatin’ eggs.
I guess I stand alone in protest of the term “Canadian bacon” (Where are my fellow Canadians or Canadian-adjacent at?). We call that stuff back bacon. Bacon in Canada is exactly what Americans think of as bacon.
I grew up hearing it called back bacon too, but that’s because uncle and grandpa were meat-cutters and not because of any attempt to be better Americans to our northern neighbors.
Missed opportunity here: can I get a Royale With Cheese?
Mmm smoked salmon
For many reasons I love cruises. Several of these reasons involve all the food, because I am a fatty who loves eating.
So until they changed the menu sometime around 2019, Carnival had a bagel with smoked salmon and cream cheese on the deli menu. The deli that is open from like 10am-1am, so really whenever you want almost.
That bagel had a slab of cream cheese (like twice what I would do at home) and then they added a slab of smoked salmon. A massive slab of delicious smoked salmon. Like easily at least 5-6 ounces of it. It was my favorite lunch or mid afternoon snack.
I’m always up for a good bagel (I prefer smoked whitefish on mine) but Better Half goes through these weird food…they’re not exactly obsessions, but patterns or habits, like I’ve seen children do. We’ve been in salmon bagel stage for quite a while, but he is slowly weaning himself away and has moved on to adding fruit to yogurt which, best of all, he does for himself. I’m still recovering from the avocado toast phase, which was blessedly brief. What happened was he escaped my supervision and went out to brunch with friends and it was on the menu. It hadn’t really become a craze yet but it was trending. He came back raving about it and asked if I had ever had it. “Of course I have, and so have you. You probably don’t remember this but remember about 20 years ago we left LA and drove up to Santa Barbara and the traffic was really bad so we stopped somewhere and, because we are who we are, we decided to kill some time by eating? It was in Ventura County. It might have been the city of Ventura itself. Anyway, that’s what we had. I thought it was a novelty item, because they grow so many avocados in California and in Mexico. Are you listening to me?”