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Side-Dish of Eggs
Cut hard-boiled eggs in half, the long way. Take out the yolks and mix them with bread-crumbs, salt, pepper and butter. Put them back in the whites. Set the halved eggs in the pan, with the yolks up, and bake until the yolks, but not the whites, are browned.
Stewed Tripe, -Soak the cleaned tripe in salt water for several hours. Then boil until quite tender. When cool, cut into small strips, dredge thoroughly with flour, and cook in a stew-pan with butter until hot. Pour in half a pint of cream, stir until thickened , and serve.
Two short recipes run together here, and the egg one carries an obvious typesetting slip: the line about mixing the yolks with crumbs and returning them to the whites is printed twice. Do it once. Neither recipe gives quantities, so the proportions below are the ones that work.
- Filling proportionsThe recipe gives no quantities. For six eggs, the twelve yolks take roughly 1/4 cup fine dry bread-crumbs and 2 tablespoons softened butter, plus salt and pepper. Mash to a paste stiff enough to mound; adjust crumbs and butter to taste.
- Oven and browningThe book gives no heat at all. A hot oven of about 400F on an upper rack, or 2-3 minutes under a broiler, will do it. Watch them: the point is colour on the yolk surface only, and over-cooked whites toughen and weep.
- Keep the whites paleThat instruction is the hinge of the dish. Set the halves in a shallow pan without added fat and give them brief, direct top heat so the crumbed yolks toast before the whites take any colour.
- YieldEach egg gives two halves; six eggs make twelve, enough for four to six as a side dish. The recipe itself specifies no number of eggs.
- Half a pint of creamOne cup. Heavy cream thickens as written; with light cream or half-and-half the flour dredge alone will give a thin sauce.
- Tripe you can actually buyMost tripe sold at retail today comes already scalded and often bleached, which is probably close to what the recipe means by 'cleaned.' The salt-water soak is still worth several hours, changed once or twice.
- Boil until tender means hoursNot minutes. Bleached honeycomb tripe wants 1.5 to 3 hours at a bare simmer before it is tender enough to cut and finish; test by cutting a strip rather than by the clock.
- The flour dredgeDredging the cooled strips and frying them in butter before the cream goes in both thickens the sauce and gives the tripe some flavour of its own. Let the floured strips sizzle a few minutes; raw flour in cream tastes of paste.
Stuffed hard-boiled eggs of exactly this kind, seasoned and returned to their whites, run back through English and American cookery; the term "deviled" was applied to spiced dishes generally well before it attached to stuffed eggs, and the mustard-and-vinegar version and the plainer bread-crumb-and-butter filling here seem to have overlapped rather than succeeded one another. Browning the yolks turns it into a hot dish rather than a cold one — the sort of small savoury relish set on the table alongside the meat, not a course. The tripe printed after it belongs to the same economy of the period kitchen, when the stomach lining of cattle was cheap, widely sold, and expected to be soaked and simmered at length before cream and butter made it company food.