A quest for the best eggs Benedict
KENYA: An eggs-cellent adventure across continents to crack the code of a classic dish.
Some people have a signature meal by which they measure restaurants. A foodie friend rates Thai venues on their massaman beef, irrespective if the red duck curry or larb salad are below average. A globetrotting colleague fancies soft shell crab, and orders it whenever it’s in season, wherever he is.
My benchmark dish is eggs Benedict. Simple ingredients, subtle flavors and perfect textures. But rarely do all the elements align to my liking. But they obviously did back in 1894 at New York’s Waldorf Hotel, home to one of the more celebrated origin myths of this classic dish.
The story goes like this: In 1894. Lemuel Benedict, a Wall Street stockbroker, needed something to quell a nagging hangover. He goes to the newly opened Waldorf Hotel on Park Avenue and after consulting maître d’ Oscar Tschirky, settles on "buttered toast, poached eggs, crisp bacon, and a pitcher of hollandaise."
Tschirky later tweaked the dish by substituting ham off the bone for the bacon and an English muffin for the toast. And so the legend supposedly began.
So, keen to sample what’s become of Lemuel’s legacy, I made my way to the hotel’s lobby restaurant one weekday morning. Coincidentally, I too was nursing a nagging hangover. But that was not intentional, and a story for another time. As for the eggs Benedict: best I’d ever eaten. Was decadent, but not heavy. The hollandaise's richness was tempered by the tang of vinegar and the lightness of the egg white. Canadian bacon added savory depth without pushing it over the edge. A light dusting of shaved truffles topped it off.
I lingered longer to savor the experience. By the time I’d waddled back down to Grand Central and along 42nd Street to Times Square to pick up my Mary Poppins tickets, the nagging hangover had well and truly vanished, only to be replaced by a grumbling stomach ache.
Perhaps my glowing gastronomic appraisal was emotionally tainted, what with being swept up in the dish's ‘colorful’ history, as well as being seduced by the hotel’s nostalgic grandeur and glamor. After all, a venue’s décor and decorum, your demeanor and digestive expectation, not to mention the price paid, can all contribute to one's assessment of a dining experience or individual dish.
Fast forward a few years
I’m on safari in Tanzania and Kenya, staying at a tented camp called Kirawira, which sits high on an escarpment between Mount Kenya and Meru National Parks.
Kirawira’s relative isolation means that much of its produce is either grown, baked, smoked, reared, slaughtered, harvested, cured, aged, churned, roasted, frozen (in the case of home-made ice-cream) and prepared on site. To say their produce was free range is a slight understatement, in an East African kind of way.
And a local version of eggs Benedict was on the breakfast menu. In Kirawira, the first hint that its version might be something special was the presence of speck instead of bacon or ham. Unlike most pork products, speck is cold-smoked and boned before being cured in salt and various spices. Traditionally, this can impart a distinctive but subtle hint of juniper.
And if this meaty treat wasn’t enough, the highlight turned out to be the hollandaise: a luscious velvety triumph of deliciousness. And it’s the hollandaise that can make or break the dish, which is why the Waldorf was my ‘winner’ thus far.
But this is where things get personal. I’m not a fan of the Gordon-Ramsey-clarified-butter approach to hollandaise (slowly heated until the water, milk solids and fat have separated, and then drained to give pure milk fat) because you can end up with a ‘stiff’ sauce; its consistency resembling mayonnaise.
I prefer a hollandaise that can be comfortably poured rather than laboriously spooned. Regular unsalted butter better achieves this, which I later discovered is the Kirawira way. Accordingly, only the slightest squeeze of lemon is required to counter the fatty richness of the butter during prep.
So, with all ‘foodie’ things considered, not to mention the panoramic uniqueness of the whole 5-star luxury 'tent' experience, Kirawira’s version got the nod over New York’s. Wasn't expecting that!
A few hours before the best eggs Benedict
I had risen, unzipped the ‘tent’ and was standing barefoot and disheveled on the elevated deck wiping sleep from my eyes when Victor arrived. He was holding a silver tray. I’d forgotten about this personable 'wake-up call', which we’d been informed about the night before. The tray came with a double espresso, a pot of tea wrapped in a blue cozy, and freshly baked pastries.
Victor’s ‘routine’ commenced with a friendly Swahili greeting. He then set the tray down, with its Villeroy & Boch crockery and sterling silver cutlery, on the outdoor table before informing me there were no animal incursions into camp overnight. He also added a weather forecast: “Humid, mostly sunny, high twenties, but it feels warmer, chance of late afternoon thunderstorm.”
Victor left. I looked to the right. Off in the distance a troop of baboons were cavorting and squealing in the early morning light. Clumps of flat-topped acacia trees seemed to be brimming and singing with exotic bird life. Then a hot air balloon drifted into view. I sipped the steaming cup of locally grown brew and wondered what word atheists use instead of ‘heaven’.
The night before the best eggs Benedict
T'was our first night in 'camp' and following a bountiful table d’hôte dinner and multiple glasses of South African pinotage in the fine dining tent, guests adjourned to the sumptuous lounge 'tent' for cognac and cards. But I needed to grab a sweater because the evening air had cooled considerably (after a searing day on safari). As I was about to head off to our tent, one of the waiters diplomatically yelled:
'Wait. I call security."
"Sorry?"
"We are not fenced in. Animals are very active at night. Some come into camp. Not safe to walk by yourself after sunset," he explained.
Actually, this was all shared on arrival earlier that day, but I'd forgotten some of the details thanks largely to the pinotage.
A big burly, uniformed, armed and silent guard duly arrived, wearing a rather fetching beret. He carried a torch the size of a truncheon in one hand while a rifle was slung across the other shoulder. He then proceeded to escort me to and from tent #6, free of incident. Later, I lost the poker pot in a cliffhanger. You don't see that too often, having an armed guard accompany you to and from your hotel 'room' at night, that is.
Two days before the best eggs Benedict
Nor do you see a million or so wildebeest on any given day of the week. Our drive to the tented camp in a 4WD Land Rover from Tanzania crossed smack bang in the middle of one of the largest herds on their southern migration. The way ahead was clear as we approached a group grazing just off the side of the bumpy rutted road. But like sheep, one wildebeest looked up, and likely thought: “I’m feeling lucky. I’ve survived lions and crocodile attacks so far this season; the worst dangers are out of the way. Why not play ‘chicken’ with this oncoming Jeep?”
So it waited, and waited until we were almost adjacent, then bolted right across in front of us. The next one followed immediately, then the next, so we braked, because animals naturally have right of way, and before too long, a few hundred thousand more had mobilized to play 'follow the leader'. An hour later (OK, it was probably closer to 15 minutes), a gap appeared, our driver slipped the vehicle into gear and we continued westward, deeper and deeper into the Serengeti.
Earlier that same day, we’d climbed a hill to try and get a better ‘picture’ of this massive animal movement. In sections they were almost in single file, but you couldn’t see the start or end of the line, for it stretched to the horizon in both directions. Yet in other parts of the verdant, flat plain, scattered groups filled the entire landscape, like small dark pebbles randomly strewn across a giant green blanket, necks bent grazing on the lush grass. Being less than 5 degrees south of the equator, the sun bears down with typical tropical intensity.
Guidebooks refer to the wildebeest migration as one of the greatest wildlife spectacles on Earth. Hard to argue with that. If you time your visit with theirs, bring heavy-duty insect repellent. Hundreds of thousands of feeding bovines tend to drop dung by the bucket load, which encourages a few billion flies to join the ‘party’. And these flies bite.
Four days before the best eggs Benedict
We left our room at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge to head to breakfast, and being room 68 of 72 (with the restaurant located on the far side of room #1), there was a decent walk of several hundred meters along an elevated, open-sided verandah to get there. On exiting the room, we were confronted by a family of buffaloes - mum, dad and junior, less than 10 meters away - casually munching the dewy grass. Mother and child looked momentarily at us, then continued their own breakfast. The bull however, about the size of a small car (adults can weigh up to 800 kilos), stared intently. It had a very runny nose. We eyed each other across a simple post-and-rail balustrade, nodded 'good morning' and went our separate ways. You don't see that too often, at least not first thing in the morning.
Five days before the best eggs Benedict
Still at the Ngorongoro Crater Lodge, we were having pre-dinner Kilimanjaro beers in the cavernous lounge, watching the Maasai dance and acrobatic troupe, when an elephant emerged from the dense bush on the crater's rim, just on dusk, and casually meandered to within about 50 meters of us.
All elephants are big, but this guy was enormous. He was 'long in the tusk' too, probably older than 60, according to the lodge's resident naturalist, who explained that many elephants 'retire' to the Ngorongoro Crater because a lack of adequate teeth in old age means their diet is increasingly restricted to softer grasses, which are found in abundance in sections of the crater's fertile, but swampy floor, more than 600 meters below our terrace bar.
But up on the rim, oblivious to the armada of cameras aimed at him, he lazily lumbered past soaking up the attention like a slow motion celebrity milking the red carpet for every last snap of the lens. You don't see that too often, at least not while having pre-dinner drinks.
Then there was the intimate encounter with a leopard, daily prides of lions to admire, boy zebras fighting over a girl, a family of white rhinos that … oh, you get the picture. Seriously, it had been that kind of week – action packed and incident filled – since arriving at Arusha, in northern Tanzania, ground zero for the country's famous safaris.
But who would've thought that I now have a new benchmark for eggs Benedict, found high on a hill in a tented camp of unbridled luxury during the last few days of an African safari.