Pickled Eggs
Pint strong vinegar, half pint cold water, tea-spoon each of cinnamon, allspice, and mace; boil the eggs till very hard and take off the shell; put on the spices tied in a white muslin bag, in the cold water, boil, and if the water wastes away, add enough so as to leave a half pint when done; add the vinegar, and pour over the eggs, put in as many eggs as the mixture will cover, and when they are used, the same will do for another lot. Or, after boiling (hard) and removing shell, place in jar of beet pickles, and the white will become red; cut in two in serving.
A straightforward refrigerator pickle for hard-boiled eggs, with a second version that borrows colour and acid from a jar of pickled beets. The proportions are sound; the storage advice is where it dates.
- Refrigerate, and don't reuse the brineThe original assumes a cool cellar and expects you to pour the same vinegar over a second batch of eggs. Keep the jar in the refrigerator and eat within a few weeks, and discard the brine after one batch rather than topping it up with fresh eggs, which dilute the acid and introduce bacteria each time.
- Vinegar strength"Strong vinegar" here most likely means full-strength cider or white vinegar rather than a diluted one; ordinary supermarket vinegar at 5 percent acidity is what you want. Do not cut the vinegar further than the recipe does -- with a half pint of water to a pint of vinegar the brine is already about as dilute as is sensible for a keeping pickle.
- MeasuresA pint is 2 cups, a half pint 1 cup. The finished brine is about 3 cups.
- Whole spices, not groundTie whole cinnamon stick, allspice berries and blades of mace in the muslin bag. Ground spice will pass through cheesecloth and leave the brine muddy and gritty; a teaspoon of each in whole form is about right.
- "Very hard"Ten to twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water. The shells slip off more easily from eggs a week or so old than from very fresh ones.
- Pour hot over the eggsPour warm over the eggs -- The instruction is to boil the spiced water, add the vinegar, and pour the mixture over the eggs, so a pint of cold vinegar meets a half pint of boiling water and the brine goes on warm rather than hot. Let the jar cool on the counter before it goes into the refrigerator.
- Curing timeNo waiting period is given. The whites take colour and flavour in two or three days; a week gives you something that tastes pickled all the way through. The beet version reddens the outer layer within a day.
- The beet variationIt works only if the beet pickle is itself vinegar-based and still well covered with liquid. The stain penetrates only the outer layer of the white, and the recipe's instruction to cut the eggs in two in serving shows the red rim against the yolk.
Pickled eggs belong to the same nineteenth-century household logic as pickled beets, walnuts and onions: hens lay in bursts, eggs do not keep, and vinegar was the cheapest preservative in the house. Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping, compiled in Marysville, Ohio and first published in 1877 from contributions by local women, is full of this kind of thrift, and the instruction to save the brine for a second batch is a fair sample of its temper. The beet-stained version is often associated with Pennsylvania German cooking, where red beet eggs remain a fixture of picnic and church-supper tables, though the trick of colouring a white with pickled beet liquid is simple enough to have arisen in many kitchens independently. Mace — the lacy covering of the nutmeg seed — was far commoner in American spice cupboards then than now, and its appearance alongside cinnamon and allspice marks this as a sweet-spiced pickle rather than a peppery one.