Food You Can Eat: Vincent Price’s Eggs Buckingham

I once had, in my hot little hands, a falling-apart copy of Vincent and Mary Price’s A Treasury of Great Recipes. Did you know that Vincent Price and his wife Mary were great chefs and gourmands? Yes. In 1965 they published this cookbook and it was a huge hit. I lost my copy, but I want to give a shout-out to silverscreensuppers.com for reminding me of this recipe recently. I wandered the web and came across thefooddictator.com, which thinks I am an AI bot, but I got far enough to see that they reproduced the recipe in full. Incredibly bored, I made it for us as an Easter Monday breakfast/brunch. This feeds two very hungry men but I’ve amended it slightly.

==================

6 slices bread [This is misleading. You need six slices of a bigger loaf, sliced thicker and just bigger in general than American supermarket bread. You’ll see why when you see what you do with it.]

2 tbsp. butter [softened, put this in a small bowl you’ll use later]

2 tbsp. top-quality anchovy paste, made by crushing Ortiz brand Anchovies [these still exist, but I think this was spon-con. I used whatever Better Half picked up for me.]

1 teaspoon English mustard [I used Dijon; “English” is code for “not bland, sugary, American mustard”]

8 eggs

3 tbsp. cream

1/4 tsp. salt [I omitted this. The anchovy paste made it salty enough for us]

1/8 tsp. pepper [that means, don’t dirty a measuring spoon, two shakes from a pepper shaker will do]

1 tbsp. finely-minced onion (optional) [It certainly was for me]

2 1/2 tbsp. butter [I think it’s assumed that all the butter used is salted; that’s what I used]

1 tbsp. grated cheddar cheese [don’t worry about this until later, but have some cheddar and your grater handy]

A few drops of Worcestershire sauce

---

Here again I varied.

Remove the crusts from the bread and toast them so they warm up a little bit, but that’s all. Put them on a small baking sheet. In the small bowl where the butter is softening, add the anchovy mash and the mustard. Cream this with the fork you smooshed the anchovies with, and then with the fork smear the bread with a layer of this mixture.

Make very buttery, slightly undercooked scrambled eggs: In another bowl beat the 8 eggs with the little bit of pepper. Turn on your broiler. Over low heat in a skillet on the stovetop melt in the other 2 1/2 tbsp butter, pour in the eggs, and stir this around, but you don’t want the eggs to be done quite yet. When the eggs are firm enough to handle with a spatula or a slotted spoon (no tongs for this!) divide them up over the six bread slices. Hand-grate some cheddar cheese over all of this. As much as you want, but not too much. You don’t want to wind up with a crust. Then, add the few drops of Worcestershire to each. Pop these in the broiler until the eggs are cooked and the cheddar is melted, this goes very quickly. I think it took me 3 minutes or less but the Faithful Hound was distracting me and the Better Half Half through this entire process was in another room watching a “Judge Judy” rerun at top volume so I could hear that too.

I thought it was delicious. YMMV. Better Half’s certainly did.

• Note: There seems to be only one photo in existence of Eggs Buckingham online, taken by The Food Dictator themself. It’s a little different from mine, and they garnished with parsley, which for two people who have been together longer than a lot of people have been alive, and with no one else around to impress, and crawling out of the pandemic, no, that’s too extra. No parsley garnish.