Scrambled Eggs
In a deep earthen pie-plate, warm sweet milk, allowing two tablespoons to each egg (or less, with a large number of eggs), add a bit of butter size of a walnut, and a little salt and pepper. When nearly to boiling point drop in the eggs, broken one at a time in a saucer; with a spoon or thin-bladed knife gently cut the eggs, and scrape the mixture up from the bottom of the plate as it cooks. If it begins to cook dry and fast at the bottom, move the dish back instantly, for success depends wholly on cooking gently and evenly, proportions being of secondary importance. Take from stove before it has quite all thickened, and continue turning it up from bottom of dish a moment longer. If served in another dish (it keeps warmer served in same) have it well heated. The mixture should be in large flakes of mingled white and yellow, and as delicate as baked custard.
A gentle, custard-style scramble rather than the fast dry-pan version most cooks default to. The whole method rests on low, even heat and pulling the pan early.
- The hinge: heat and timingKeep the pan low enough that the eggs never sizzle, and take it off the burner while a visible amount is still loose. The residual heat of the dish finishes the job as you keep folding, which is exactly how the "large flakes" texture is achieved.
- "Deep earthen pie-plate"A deep glazed earthenware dish set over the top of a range. On a modern hob use a heavy nonstick or well-seasoned skillet, or a saucepan if you want the sides high; earthenware will not work on induction at all and can heat unevenly over a gas flame.
- Sweet milkSimply fresh, unsoured milk, as distinct from the buttermilk or clabbered milk common in nineteenth-century kitchens. Nothing sweetened is intended.
- Butter size of a walnutAbout 1 oz, or 2 tablespoons. Shelled-walnut size, not the whole nut in shell.
- The milk ratioTwo tablespoons per egg is generous by current standards and gives a soft, wet, almost custard curd; the book itself says to reduce it when cooking many eggs. One tablespoon per egg gives a firmer flake if that suits you better.
- Breaking eggs into a saucerA sensible habit from the days of uncertain eggs: it catches a bad one before it ruins the batch. It also means the eggs go into the hot milk unbeaten, which along with the gentle cutting is likely what gives the mingled white-and-yellow flakes rather than a uniform yellow.
- ServingEggs left this soft do not hold well. Serve straight from the cooking dish as directed, or into a plate warmed beforehand, as the recipe says.
Buckeye Cookery (whose origins are generally traced to an Ohio church compilation of the mid-1870s, though the 1877 Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping was issued in Minneapolis, and much reprinted thereafter) belongs to the compiled-by-committee tradition of American household manuals, and its egg chapter reflects a kitchen where eggs were seasonal, plentiful in spring and scarce in winter, and where stretching them with milk was ordinary economy rather than a texture choice. The insistence on gentle heat is a coal-range instruction: a cook could not turn a dial down, only move the dish back from the firebox to a cooler part of the top, which is precisely what the recipe tells her to do. The comparison to baked custard is telling — the writer treats scrambled eggs as a set egg-and-milk dish handled with a spoon, closer to what a French cook would call oeufs brouillés than to the brisk dry curd of a diner griddle.