Methuselah’s Brunch: Eggs Benedict

The genesis of Eggs Benedict is famously difficult to pin down. Mostly what we know is this: it’s been around a while. Invented in the late 19th Century, it’s been a staple of brunch menus across the US ever since. A debate raged through the mid 20th Century over which Benedict to credit with its invention–or inspiration. That it was invented in New York City was never in doubt, but the three main competing origin stories came to a head throughout the 20th Century, with published works supporting each of them. In December of 1942, New Yorker Magazine published a brief mention in its “Talk of the Town” section, stating that

Forty-eight years ago Lemuel Benedict came into the dining room of the old Waldorf for a late breakfast. He had a hangover & ordered buttered toast, crisp bacon, 2 poached eggs, & a hooker of hollandaise sauce, & then & there put together the dish that has, ever since, borne his name, Eggs Benedict.

The New Yorker, December 19, 1942 P. 13

48 years before 1942 was either 1893 (the year the Waldorf opened) or 1894, establishing a proposed date of origin for the Benedict. Around that same time, the chef of the Waldorf’s crosstown rival Delmonico’s, Charles Ranhofer, published his classic cookbook The Epicurean containing a compendium of recipes from what was and is New York City’s oldest restaurant. That cookbook contains a recipe for “Eggs à la Benedick.”

I learned from the delightfully titled LitHub article “The Bougie, Classist History of Eggs Benedict” however that this recipe did not appear in the original 1894 edition of the cookbook, however, and was snuck into the 1912 revision instead. Delmonico’s claims that the dish was created for a Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, for whom Delmonico’s was her regular Sunday Brunch spot, and the Delmonico’s version, featuring “a round of ham” and a muffin as opposed to the “buttered toast, crisp bacon” associated with the Waldorf version, hews closer to the version of the dish passed down to us today.

To muddy the waters though, according to Lemuel Benedict the version on the Waldorf menu, with muffin and ham rather than bacon and toast, was put there by Oscar Tschirky, the legendary maitre d’ known as “Oscar of the Waldorf.” Tschirky, who is famously credited with a number of hotel menu innovations including Thousand Island dressing and Waldorf salad, curiously never claimed to have taken any part in the introduction of Eggs Benedict to that instution’s menu. Notably, his job previous to the opening of the Waldorf in 1893 was–of course–as maitre d’ at Delmonico’s.

The fur is flying, and we haven’t even gotten to the third of the battlin’ Benedicts. That story came from a 1967 article in the New York Times and claimed the Benedict was named after a Commodore E.C. Benedict. The Commodore’s version of the Benedict was served on toast–cut, however, into 3 inch rounds similar to the size of an English muffin–and topped with ham, a poached egg, and Hollandaise sauce.

The Commodore had died in 1920, but the American expat living in Paris claimed to have received this recipe and the story of its origin from his mother, whose brother had been a friend of the late Commodore. This timeline does not disagree with the other origins, all of which put the dish’s genesis in the 1890s.

America was quick to snap back though, in the form of a letter from an affronted relative of Mr. and Mrs. LeGrand Benedict, who told the family story of the Delmonico’s origin of the sandwich, claiming that Commodore E.C. Benedict was a relative who had certainly partaken of the family’s namesake dish but would never have claimed it as his own. A 1978 article and recipe published in Bon Appetit Magazine quoted this origin. And here is where we came in: LeGrand and wife, ol’ hungover Lemuel, and the Commodore, Benedicts all, all claimed in one way or another, at one time or another, to have originated the dish.

In 2007, the New York Time published a story called “Was He The Eggman?” about Jack Benedict, long-lost grandnephew of Lemuel, who evangelized the Waldorf hangover version of the Eggs Benedict origin, opening an Eggs Benedict themed restaurant and curating a sort of Benedict museum/shrine in his home, but never finishing and publishing his planned article about the dish’s origin.

In support of the timeline, I can offer the following: that any sequential occurrences of the words “eggs” and “benedict” in American newspapers prior to 1894–indeed, at any point during the 19th Century–are in descriptions of Easter festivities

However, as mentioned in the LitHub article, the January 1894 issue of literary magazine Overland Monthly featured a short story that mentioned Eggs à la Benedict. This magazine was published out of San Francisco, also the setting of the story, and one concludes that by this time the dish was well-known across the country, at least to the social elite. I can find no newspaper publications of the name of the dish in either the form “Eggs à la Benedict” or in the more prosaic “Eggs Benedict” wording, using the Library of Congress “Chronicling America” search engine, until later. Such lifestyle concerns were apparently beneath the notice of the newspapers of the 1800s, unfortunately. Similarly, there are no mentions of either in the searchable texts of Cornell University’s Home Economics Archive until well into the 20th Century.

As of Spring of 1904, identical articles about the dish began appearing in newspapers across the northeast of the country.

As the 20th Century wore on, the dish appeared to find its way into the mainstream of American life, from its rarified beginnings on the menus of this country’s most exclusive hotel restaurants, with newspapers and women’s magazines democratizing the dish by publishing recipes for preparing it in the home kitchen. Yet these same periodicals might also publish short stories wherein the dish was still the preserve of urbanites at hotel brunches. Variants began to appear as well–inventive cooks substituted this ingredient or that; companies published ads with recipes for Eggs Benedict that used their product instead of one of the canonical ingredients; and during World War II, substitutes were made, for the ham, for the prodigious amounts of butter used in making Hollandaise sauce.

It’s safe to say that not all of these variants caught on. But some did, and have become named brunch dishes in their own rights. We’ll cover several of those later in this article. Some are standards in a particular area of the country, but not necessarily a fully separate variant–for example, the “Chesapeake Benedict” I tried in Baltimore several years ago, replacing the Canadian Bacon of the standard Eggs Benedict with one of Maryland’s ubiquitous crab cakes.

My own personal variant involves Thanksgiving leftovers and I’ve taken to calling it the Black Friday Benedict.

I’ll be eating that in a few days for sure.

Eggs Benedict

In the meantime, I started my Eggs Benedict journey this month by making a baked good I had not previously attempted: English muffins, using the King Arthur Sourdough English Muffins recipe but skipping the powdered milk and instead replacing some of the water with actual milk. Also, I forgot to add the butter. They turned out decently regardless, though they lacked the big “nooks and crannies” that some English muffins are known for.

We’ve mentioned Eggs Benedict before on the Tribunal. The first time was when writing about breakfast sandwiches in general and, to make a point about their infinite variability, I ate a different breakfast sandwich for each day in January 2015. Most recently was when we wrote about Peameal bacon back in 2021.

There are a few tricky pieces to making Eggs Benedict. The first is making Hollandaise sauce, which is notoriously finicky and short-lived. It isn’t actually difficult to make–as long as you have a double-boiler and are able to stir and monitor the sauce the entire time it’s cooking. That level of attention is the difficult part. However, once the sauce has been made I find it fairly forgiving to deal with. The real difficulty, for me, of making Hollandaise sauce is how resource-intensive it is. My recipe calls for 3 egg yolks and a full stick of good quality butter–something yellow and tasty and better than standard supermarket butter, like Kerrygold or an equivalent sized hunk of an Amish butter roll.

The Hollandaise sauce can be kept aside while the other ingredients are prepped, and reheated/refreshed quickly by returning the double boiler top over the boiling water and stirring. If the sauce seems to break, it can usually be revived by adding a spoonful of water and stirring stirring stirring.

The other tricky part about Eggs Benedict is the poached egg. My current technique involves cracking each egg into a small fine-mesh strainer for a moment to allow the looser bits of white to drain away, then transferring the drained egg to a bowl for its transfer to the water. Since I am usually doing two eggs at once, I do not whirlpool the simmering water as many do–I add some vinegar to the water to help the outsides of the egg set, gently decant each egg into the simmering water, and allow them to cook for 2 1/2 or 3 minutes, until the white is cooked but the yolk is still liquid.

As for the English muffin and the Canadian bacon, a light toasting is all the former needs, and gentle heating in a low-heat pan while the eggs cook is good enough for the latter. Canadian bacon is made from pork loin, and can dry out quickly–it doesn’t need to be browned aggressively the way fattier belly bacon generally is.

Then it’s simply a matter of assembly–the lightly toasted English muffin, which doesn’t strictly need more butter with all the Hollandaise sauce that’s about to be poured on it but I generally tend to default to buttering English muffins when they come out of the toaster.

Then the Canadian Bacon

A poached egg atop each slice of bacon

And then Hollandaise sauce on top of the eggs. The standard is to use a tablespoon or so on each egg. I use maybe just a bit more than that. Enough to cover the eggs without drowning the muffin.

That and some home fries or hash browns on the side are about all you need. Eggs Benedict recipes over the past century have called for various garnishes–truffle, mushroom, paprika, etc. I’m just old-fashioned enough to want to sprinkle something over the top, and as it happens I like chives on my eggs.

Eggs Benedict is the dish that launched a thousand brunches, and for good reason. There is nothing to dislike here, the sturdy base of a sourdough muffin, its toaster-crisped edges softening under the encroaching sauce and yolk, the firm but tender saltiness of Canadian Bacon, the perfect softness of a poached egg and the gushing yolk within enriching that blanket of Hollandaise over all, thick and buttery, richly savory with a hint of citrus and the bite of pepper.

Eggs Benedict is a bit old-fashioned, and it may be too ordinary these days to find itself on the high-end hotel restaurant menus. It may in fact be too old-fashioned to grace many brunch menus. But every pancake house, Greek diner, and hashery within a five mile radius of my house has at least a classic Benedict on its menu, and usually 2 or 3 variants as well. Perhaps not the fast food breakfast spots but consider this: do you think the Egg McMuffin would exist were it not for the success of Eggs Benedict? The classic McDonald’s breakfast sandwich was invented explicitly to resemble this venerable brunch tradition. It subs American cheese in for the Hollandaise sauce (and adds the top of the muffin, making the whole more portable), but given the finicky nature of the sauce I suppose I’d rather replace it with cheese than try whatever Frankenstein creation McDonald’s would have invented in the early 1970s to make a stable Hollandaise.

Now speaking of those Benedict variants…

Eggs Florentine

According to The Munchery, Eggs Florentine may have a longer history than Eggs Benedict, despite the former seemingly being a meatless knockoff of the latter. Their story references the long French tradition of calling anything featuring spinach “Florentine,” dating back to the 16th Century when Catherine de Medici married King Henry II of France and brought her favorite vegetable–and Italian cooks to prepare it–with her. French Eggs a la Florentine would have topped a bed of baked or creamy scrambled eggs with wilted spinach and a Mornay sauce. Contemporary American Eggs Florentine recipes steer directly into Benedict territory, simply replacing the Canadian bacon with creamed spinach.

This was Mindy’s favorite of the Benedict variants–the creamed spinach has an assertive, slightly bitter, mineral flavor that stands up well to the richness of the sauce. It feels slightly less substantial than a standard Benedict, but probably wouldn’t if I had stacked the spinach on a bit higher.

Eggs Royale

Eggs Royale is among the most common of Benedict variants, and goes by many names depending where you are: Eggs Halifax, Eggs Pacifica, Eggs Hemingway, Eggs Copenhagen, Eggs Montreal… Eggs Royale is but one of many names for a salmon Benedict but perhaps the most widely-used of them, or the least regional. In place of the Canadian Bacon, Eggs Royale substitutes cured, cold-smoked salmon, what we might call Nova Lox.

This was my favorite of the variants–I love the texture of smoked salmon in a breakfast dish, and the lush salty and smoky flavors of the fish flesh made this richer and more indulgent yet than the Benedict, which sets a fairly high bar for indulgence. Some serve this with red onion and capers, in keeping with standard lox protocol, but the “Eggs Halifax” variant specifically called for chives so thanks Halifax! Chives is what I have, and chives is what I like!

Eggs Cochon

New Orleans is a city legendary for its cuisine. Chefs at the more famous NOLA eateries have been turning out Benedict variants for as long as Eggs Benedict has existed–and perhaps longer. Eggs Sardou, often thought of as a Benedict offshoot, was named in honor of Victorien Sardou, a 19th Century French playwright who died in 1908. The form of Sardou–an artichoke bottom atop a bed of creamed spinach cupping a poached egg and covered in Hollandaise–suggests Benedict, but the slight variation in stacking order and the timeline suggest otherwise. Still, New Orleans has produced Eggs Hussarde, a Benedict with a mushroom and red wine sauce in addition to the Hollandaise; Eggs Fauteux, featuring smoked Gulf pompano in place of the Canadian Bacon; and the one that appealed the most to me, Eggs Cochon.

Eggs Cochon starts with a buttermilk biscuit and tops that with cochon de lait, French for “suckling pig.” While I’m sure there are purists in Louisiana as elsewhere who insist that cochon de lait must be slow-cooked over a fire, or smoked, with the only permissible variations to discuss being the intricacies of rub recipes, like the term “pulled pork” cochon de lait is often used to refer to slow-cooker fare, rubbed with Creole seasoning mixes and cooked until falling apart in a base liquid of water and vinegar or juice. The former sounds better to me–time can afford me only the latter this month.

It’s terrific though, the sweet and savory strands of pork reluctantly releasing gravy into the waiting biscuit below, the melange of spices cutting through the richness of egg and Hollandaise above. I liked this as well as anything I’ve eaten this month save the incredible Eggs Royale above, but a good version of this, with biscuits that didn’t come out of a tube and pork that didn’t come out of a crockpot? I think that might just knock the Royale out of my top spot.