Delmonico Eggs Benedict Image Used Under Creative Commons License From amny.com

Citizens, your rich and delicious tastes are well-documented here as members of TFD Nation – now let me blow your minds with the O.G. itself – Eggs Benedict! This is the original recipe from the place that invented the dish – the legendary Delmonico’s Restaurant in New York City, where the aristocracy of the Gilded Age dined!

Eggs Benedict was invented at Delmonico’s — America’s first great restaurant — in the late 1860s by Chef Charles Ranhofer. The dish, which was named for a regular Delmonico’s patron at the time, Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, consists of warm toasted brioche rounds topped with proscuitto cotto, poached eggs, Hollandaise sauce, and an elegant touch of Osetra caviar.

As further elucidated in a great article on amny.com:

Before bottomless brunch on the Lower East Side, NYC’s elite were feasting on Eggs Benedict.

But what came first, the Benedictines or the Benedict?

The popular brunch dish has hazy origins, with a number of Benedicts claiming to be ancestors of the original hangover dish.

Delmonico’s believes the dish was created for a pair of regular diners, Mr. and Mrs. LeGrand Benedictine, who reported to be bored with the regular menu circa the 1860s.

“The Delmonico brothers were notorious for naming dishes after their customers,” explains current Delmonico chef Billy Oliva. The restaurant even renamed Lobster Newburg from Lobster Wenberg when the dish’s original namesake fought with manager Charles Delmonico.

The Benedictines must have tipped nicely (or something like that) to keep the attribution with the original dish, cooked for them with cured ham, poached eggs and topped with Hollandaise sauce.

“It’s just a good combination, it’s very rich and it’s a good hangover food,” said Oliva on the dish’s lasting popularity. “It’s also tricky to make so it’s an item that people don’t want to try at home and they order it out.”

But the history of Eggs Benedict cracks more shells.

In 1942, ‘New Yorker’ ran a ‘Talk of the Town’ piece reporting that retired Wall Street stock broker Lemuel Benedict had inspired Eggs Benedict after a visit to the Waldorf Hotel in 1894. Reportedly made with “buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon and a hooker of Hollandaise” to cure a bad hangover, this dish sounds a lot like the one Mrs. LeGrand Benedict was such a fan of at DelMonico’s.

While recipes attributing various kitchens to the origin of this eponymous dish have been published for over a century, a 2007 ‘New York Times’ article says it best: “Eggs Benedict is a mystery rooted in a long-vanished version of New York.”

I have gilded the lily by adding a bit of minced flowering chives to this classic – feel free to omit for the version as served at Delmonico’s! Note that English Muffins are NEVER used at the restaurant – I urge you to follow their leadership, Citizens! 🙂

Battle on – The Generalissimo

Buckingham Eggs Image Used Under Creative Commons License From silverscreensuppers.com

Citizens, as we approach the frightful holiday of All Hallow’s Eve, allow me to share details of my favorite actor in the entire horror genre – the suave Mephistopheles himself, the unmatched Vincent Price!

publicity photo for the 1959 movie “The Bat”

You may know him only for his acclaimed work in the early 1950’s and 1960’s horror movies (or as the creepy voiceover in Thriller), but you should be aware his reputation was also of the highest rank as a Thespian, voice actor, philanthropist, art critic, and as a bon vivant, including co-writing one of the most famous cookbooks of the 1960’s with his wife!

Over the next posts, I will be sharing some of my favorite recipes from this legendary tome, original copies of which can go for more than $200! I am honored to have an original in my library, but the book was re-issued a few years back for much less – you can buy it here on Amazon!

As noted in a great article on npr.org back in 2007 commemorating the reissue of the classic cookbook:

The late Vincent Price was a horror film icon. With perfect elocution, he delivered creepy invitations to haunted houses in such movies as House of Wax (1953) and House on Haunted Hill (1959). He was a regular on TV’s Hollywood Squares and a villain on the 1960s TV series Batman. Price’s deep voice narrated Michael Jackson’s 1982 music video for “Thriller” and was an inspiration to director Tim Burton. But Price was also a foodie.

“He had an omnivorous appetite for life and for food,” says Victoria Price of her father, who was also an art collector and consultant who founded an art museum in California. (He encouraged people to buy works of art by Pablo Picasso and other modern masters from Sears.)

Price and his second wife, Mary, were such food connoisseurs that in 1965, they wrote a best-selling cookbook, A Treasury of Great Recipes. It’s been out of print until now. Victoria helped get the book reissued for its 50th anniversary, with a preface by chef Wolfgang Puck.

Victoria Price remembers her father spending hours perfecting creme brulee, and hosting lavish dinner parties at his Beverly Hills mansion. She writes of her mother, a costume designer, creating the perfect atmospheres for the parties: She once copper-glazed an entire set of dishes for one meal.

“She was Martha Stewart way before Martha Stewart,” Price told NPR. “And then my dad was the ultimate convivial host and just pure joy. Everybody wanted to come to a dinner party. But their dinner parties weren’t about the A-list. Their dinner parties were people they loved.”

Their guests included Hollywood producers, artists, comedian Fanny Brice’s son, Grace Kelly’s publicist, even a young actor by the name of Dennis Hopper. And what the Prices served was just as eclectic — from recipes they’d gathered as they traveled the world. Their cookbook includes dishes from some of the most famous restaurants in Europe, the U.S. and Mexico.

The Prices’ cookbook included recipes for Whitehall Club Chocolate Roll and Soufflé au Grande Marnier, photographed by artist Tosh Matsumoto. “If you eat some of these recipes one too many times, I think your cholesterol level might just go ballistic. There’s a lot of butter; there’s a lot of heavy cream. But the ones that are people’s favorites are actually pretty easy to make, and they’re kind of classic,” says Price.

The cookbook includes Mad Men-era recipes, old menus, the original typeface and the original photos by jazz photographer William Claxton, Life magazine’s Eliot Elisofon, and artist Tosh Matsumoto.

The images feature sumptuous spreads and waiters from legendary restaurants around the world. There’s stuffed trout from La Pyramide in Lyon, France; gazpacho Andaluz from the Sobrino de Botin in Madrid (considered the oldest restaurant in the world); frog’s legs polonaise from Sardi’s in New York.

Price says her folks also believed that gourmet was not just for the elite and that ambience was everything. So they also included recipes for French toast, which they used to eat on the Santa Fe train from LA to New Mexico, and hot dogs, like the kind they relished while watching the Dodgers play baseball.

Vincent and Mary both liked to cook, as they told TV’s This is Your Life in 1973. “We each have our specialties,” Mary admitted. “So together we add up to be one pretty good cook.”

The Prices divorced that same year. But their cookbook has remained a collectible classic.

Victoria Price says for years, chefs have treasured the book, and many readers have told her about how much they’ve loved to cook from it, often given as a wedding gift.

Price can still remember having to curtsy at her parents’ dinner parties. And she recalls her father’s wicked sense of humor. With NPR, she shared one Halloween memory, of going house to house in Beverly Hills: “My dad would accompany us, and would jump out of bushes and scare the owners of the house,” she says. “So we got the treat and they got the trick.”

With his cookbook in print again, Vincent Price lives on.

This recipe from The Treasury of Great Recipes (1965) is a delicious introduction to Mr. Price’s extraordinary taste in food – I hope you enjoy it as much as I do, Citizens! It’s a melding of the classic Scotch Woodcock (itself a variation of Welsh Rarebit, but made with anchovy) and cooked eggs on toast that is truly divine!

Battle on – The Generalissimo