Breakfast Foods - Eggs Benedict

Eggs Benedict is a much loved breakfast food. It is made by toasting a whole English muffin then topping that with ham, Canadian bacon, or bacon as well as poached eggs. The whole thing is then drowned in hollandaise sauce.

Much like many popular foods, the origins of Eggs Benedict are unknown. In one account, retired Wall Street stock broker Lemuel Benedict wandered into the Waldorf Hotel in 1894 and requested "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a hooker of hollandaise" in an attempt to find a cure for his morning hangover. The maître d'hôtel Oscar Tshirky, the legendary Oscar of the Waldorf, was immensely impressed by the dish and so put it on the breakfast and lunch menus. Rather than using bacon and toast, he substituted ham and an English muffin. This account was given in an interview in the "Talk of the Town" column of The New Yorker in 1942.

In another account, Craig Claiborne, a writer for The New York Times Magazine, described in a September 1967 column a letter received from Edward P. Montgomery, an American living in France at the time. In the letter, Montgomery detailed a dish that was created by Commodore E.C. Benedict. Commodore Benedict was a banker and yachtsman who died in 1920 at the age of 86. The dish created by Commodore Benedict was Eggs Benedict. The commodore claims that the recipe had been given to him by his mother who had received it from the commodore's uncle.

In November of 1967, Mabel C. Butler of Vineyard Haven, Massachusetts responded to Mr. Montgomery's letter with a correction to the story that was the "true story" of how Eggs Benedict came to be. In Ms. Butler's story, the creation of Eggs Benedict was well known to the relatives of Mrs. Le Grand Benedict, of whom she was one. According to Ms. Butler, Mr. and Mrs. Benedict, who were residents of New York at the turn of the century, dined every Saturday at Delmonico's. One day while there, Mrs. Benedict wanted to know if the maître d'hôtel had anything new or different to suggest. He then asked Mrs. Benedict to make a suggestion so she suggested poached eggs on a toasted English muffin with a thin slice of ham, hollandaise sauce, and a truffle on top.

While all of these stories are wonderful, it is most likely that the dish is a Lenten or meatless dish possibly dating to the Renaissance. It is a traditional French dish, most likely, and a variation of oeufs bénédictine. This dish consists of brandade, a purée of refreshed salt cod and potatoes, spread on triangles of fried bread. A poached egg is then placed on top and napped with hollandaise.

What is still not known is how the dish immigrated to the United States or even how it became popular. For more information on Eggs Benedict, please visit http://www.cdkitchen.com.

Joseph Devine

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