Take 4 eggs, 2 cups of milk, 4 tablespoonfuls of sugar, 1 teaspoonful of flour. Beat whites separate; add flour to the yolks and sugar; beat until stiff. Beat the whites and scald in milk; strain from the milk, and set aside. Take the yolk, and stir gently in the milk until thick. Remove from the fire. Place in a dish to cool. Flavor with vanilla and then put the whites on top and serve.
This is œufs à la neige under another name: meringues poached in milk, then floated on the custard made from the same milk. The instructions are compressed to the point of confusion, so the order of operations matters more than any measurement here.
- The hinge: never let the custard boilOnce the yolk mixture goes back into the milk, hold it below a simmer and stir constantly until it coats the back of a spoon — around 170-180F. A few seconds of boiling and you have sweet scrambled egg, which no amount of straining will fix.
- Reading the garbled directions"Add flour to the yolks and sugar; beat until stiff" reads as a scrambled line: it is the whites, not the yolk mixture, that would be beaten stiff. The workable order appears to be: whisk the whites to stiff peaks, poach spoonfuls of them in the scalded milk, lift them out, then whisk the yolks with the sugar and the teaspoon of flour and cook them in that same milk.
- Poaching the whitesKeep the milk at a bare tremble, not a boil, and give the spoonfuls of meringue about a minute a side. They firm up and swell slightly; boiling milk makes them collapse and weep. Drain them on a cloth or paper, since the water they shed will thin the custard.
- The teaspoon of flourThis is insurance, not thickening — a small amount of starch raises the temperature at which yolks curdle and makes the custard far more forgiving. Sift it into the sugar first so it does not lump in the yolks.
- SweetnessFour tablespoons of sugar for two cups of milk is restrained by modern dessert standards, and all of it goes into the custard; the whites are unsweetened. If you want sweeter meringues, take a tablespoon of the sugar and beat it into the whites instead.
- VanillaAdd it off the heat, once the custard has come away from the fire, so the alcohol and aromatics are not driven off. A split vanilla bean steeped in the milk while it scalds is the period-appropriate alternative.
- Yield and servingFour eggs and two cups of milk gives four modest servings. Chill the custard thoroughly, spoon the whites on at the last moment — they soften and slump as they sit on the custard — and serve in shallow glass dishes so the two layers show.
Under the French name œufs à la neige or the English one "floating island," this dessert had been in cookbooks for well over a century by the time it turned up here as "Belgian eggs." It is a thrift dish disguised as an elegant one: two cups of milk, four eggs and a little sugar produce something that fills a glass dish and looks like a great deal more. The trick of poaching the whites in the milk that will then become the custard means nothing is wasted and the milk picks up a faint sweetness in the process. Books of this kind — a dish a day, each pinned to a nation — belong to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and their national labels are best read loosely; the same custard appears elsewhere as French, Spanish or simply American floating island, and the Belgian attribution here likely tells you more about the compiler's need for 365 distinct headings than about Brussels.