Daily Blague

When I wrote the "Eggs Benedict" page for Portico, it never occurred to me to look elsewhere than my old Larousse Gastronomique for the derivation of this wonderful dish. Perhaps I ought to have been cued, however, by the very different nature of the concoction given in the French encyclopedia. "Pound some cod" - ? And nothing about sauce hollandaise, either. I did wonder a bit, but I didn't investigate. Lazy me.

In the City section of today's Times, there's a lengthy piece about the invention of Eggs Benedict as we know it, "Was He the Eggman?," by Gregory Beyer. Benedictine monks have nothing to do with this story; genteel New Yorkers by the name of Benedict do. We know that Lemuel Coleman Benedict really existed. He wore raccoon coats and carried a whisky-flask walking stick to football games at Princeton when his nephew was studying classics there. In 1894, suffering from a hangover, he went to the Waldorf Hotel (then standing on the site of today's Empire State Building) and ordered up toast, bacon, poached eggs, and hollandaise. The maître d', an operator known as "Oscar of the Waldorf," was impressed enough to put the results on the menu. But he changed the toast into an English muffin, and the bacon into Canadian bacon. And then he completely failed to take credit for this invention, in later self-promoting articles.

That's the Lemuel Benedict story, more or less as reported in The New Yorker in 1942. I was not reading The New Yorker in 1942, because I was not yet born. In March 1978, Bon Appetit published a story about Eggs Benedict that attributed the invention to a Mr and Mrs LeGrand Benedict, and claimed that they asked for it at Delmonico's, not the old Waldorf. I was not reading Bon Appetit in 1978, because I was in law school.

Mr Beyer's piece is mostly concerned with the efforts of one Jack Benedict, a collateral descendant of Lemuel, to establish his relative's claim to fame beyond a reasonable doubt. One of the obstacles that Jack B seems to have been unable to surmount was the reticence of "Oscar of the Waldorf." Why didn't Oscar boast about having invented Eggs Benedict?

Here is my thinking. Oscar Tschirky, a Swiss from Neuchatel, arrived in New York on the day before the Brooklyn Bridge was opened to traffic, in 1883, and secured a restaurant job the very next afternoon. I assume that he already knew something of the culinary arts. I assume, further, that he knew of the rather icky dish that Larousse Gastronomique describes. If he thought about it at all, he would have known that it would never go over in New York. Along came Mr Benedict (LeGrand or Lemuel, take your pick - the LeGrand Benedicts do not appear to have left any survivors to toot their horn) with his peculiar breakfast order. Oscar had a brainwave. Eggs Benedict became a hit. But Oscar knew better to take credit for inventing "Eggs Benedict." He had, indeed, re-invented the dish, with a patron's help. But it was one thing to claim, as he did, to have dreamed up Thousand Island Dressing, which had no Old World roots, and quite another to get creative with a venerable French recipe.

Before he became "Oscar of the Waldorf," by the way, Tschirky was Oscar of Delmonico's.