Boiled Eggs
Put them on in cold water, and when it has boiled, the eggs will be done, the whites being soft and digestible, as they are not when put on in boiling water.
A one-line method that still works, though the result depends entirely on how fast your pot comes to a boil. Read it as a soft egg, not a hard one.
- What you actually getStarting in cold water and pulling the eggs the moment the water boils generally gives a set white and a soft to jammy yolk, though the exact result varies with the pot and the burner. If you want a firm yolk, leave them in the water off the heat for another ten minutes or so.
- The variable the recipe ignoresTime to boil depends on pot size, burner output and how much water you use. Cover the eggs by about an inch and no more; a large pot of water takes long enough to heat that the eggs will be nearer hard-boiled by the time it bubbles.
- Cold start, warm eggsThe cold-water start does prevent the shells cracking from thermal shock, which is the real advantage here. Eggs straight from the refrigerator work fine with this method, unlike the boiling-water plunge.
- The digestibility claimNineteenth-century writers held that egg white cooked hard and fast was indigestible. What is true is that gentler, lower heat keeps the white tender rather than rubbery, and avoids the green-grey iron sulfide ring around an overcooked yolk.
- PeelingVery fresh eggs peel badly however they are cooked. If the eggs are to be shelled, use ones a week or more old and cool them under running cold water before starting.
- YieldFigure one to two eggs per person at breakfast. Serve in the shell in egg cups, as the book's period would have done, or shelled onto toast.
Buckeye Cookery (first widely circulated in the 1870s and 1880s as a compilation from Ohio housekeepers) is full of these terse method notes, which assume the cook already knows the shape of the task and needs only the trick. The cold-water start was a point of some contention in Victorian cookery writing: authors on both sides argued about whether coagulating albumen slowly or quickly made it easier to digest, a preoccupation of a period that took a keen and often unscientific interest in what the stomach could manage. Digestibility aside, the advice is sound for a different reason — a gradual rise in temperature keeps shells from cracking and whites from turning tough. Boiled eggs in this era were breakfast and invalid food both, valued because they arrived at the table in their own sealed container, needing no butter, no sauce and no skill.