My secrets for the perfect Eggs Benedict. First, you should have some ingredients. If you’ve planned ahead sufficiently, you should have a husband or similar who can go and shop for you. And if you haven’t, I’m not sure you have the foresight required for successfully cooking a meal – have you considered Uber eats? The ingredients you should have include plain English muffins that you can cut in half and toast (now called “Muffin Splits” with the “English” written underneath in small writing according to the packet I have in my hand); eggs (duh); sliced ham – which you could replace with smoked salmon or spinach if you were that way inclined; and a bottle of hollandaise sauce – yes, it’s possible to make your own – and if you can, good on you, and you’re clearly far too advanced for this post and should head off to some serious culinary page tout de suite – if not, lay on, Macduff!
Fill a saucepan with water which you should heat up. A gas hob is by far the best – so quick – otherwise if you have any other sort of element I guess you must be a very patient person. Add some combination of salt and/or whatever vinegar you have lying around in your cupboard according to taste. When it’s starting to boil, crack the eggs gently into it. Don’t wait until it’s a roiling boil, or crack the eggs high above the pan into the water, otherwise you’ll end up with a kind of egg soup with a Chinese vibe, or very watery scrambled eggs. It’s going to take 2 or 3 minutes to cook depending on how runny you like your yokes. Personally I prefer semisolid, but as long as all the white is cooked I’m happy – if any of the white is still clear I’ll start retching immediately. While you’re waiting you can toast the muffins. Any fool can do that so I’m not going to explain in depth.
A nice touch is to warm up the hollandaise sauce – this will maximise the chances that your guests will assume you made it from scratch. Don’t put it in the microwave – it’ll just turn into scrambled eggs (again with the scrambled!)- a rookie mistake. Instead I would half fill a bowl with boiling water, put the required amount of hollandaise in another smaller bowl, and then place one inside the other (don’t make me tell you which is which). You’ll need to stir the bowl with the hollandaise in it intermittently, but this isn’t exactly an arduous recipe so you should have plenty of time on your hands. When the eggs are ready, assemble as follows (but, really, you’ve had it loads of times before, this part isn’t rocket science): muffin (with butter if your arteries really need the workout), sliced ham, egg, and topped with sauce. Et voila!
If you’ve chosen your guests wisely, someone should offer to do the dishes for you, which you should gracefully accept after demurring briefly. If you are cooking for family it may have to be a waiting game until you find out who caves first.
