Stuffed Eggs
Cut in two, hard-boiled eggs, remove yolks, chop, and mix with them chopped cold chicken, lamb, or veal (some add a little minced onion or parsley and a few soaked bread-crumbs), season, and add gravy or the uncooked yolk of an egg, form, fill in the cavities, level, put the two halves together, roll in beaten egg and breadcrumbs, put in wire egg-basket, and dip in boiling lard; when slightly brown, serve with celery or tomato sauce
A Victorian way of stretching leftover roast meat, and one of the few fried egg dishes that still works. The hinge is the binder: the filling has to be stiff enough to hold its shape when the two halves are pressed together and rolled, or the eggs will split in the fat.
- Wire egg-basketA wire basket for lowering eggs into hot water or fat in a batch; here it would also have helped keep the two halves together. A frying basket or a spider skimmer does the same job; alternatively, pin each reassembled egg with a cocktail stick and lower it in with a slotted spoon.
- "Dip in boiling lard"This is deep frying, not boiling. Lard at 350-365F browns the crumb in about a minute; hotter and the coating colours before it sets, cooler and it soaks. Any neutral high-smoke-point fat substitutes.
- The raw yolk binderThe uncooked yolk is there to set in the fat and glue the filling. The fry is short and the centre may not reach a safe temperature, so use a pasteurised egg, or take the recipe's other option and bind with gravy, which if well reduced will stiffen as it cools.
- Hard-boiling and peelingEggs a week or so old peel far more cleanly than fresh. Twelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, keeps the yolks yellow rather than grey-green.
- Soaked bread-crumbsFresh crumbs soaked in milk or stock and squeezed dry, a panade, used to lighten the filling. Modern dried crumbs will not do the same thing; use torn fresh bread.
- SeasonThe recipe leaves it open; salt and pepper are the baseline, and nutmeg or mace turns up with veal and chicken in period cookery. Cold cooked meat is bland, so season the filling more heavily than seems right.
- YieldSix eggs give twelve halves, six assembled eggs, and want roughly 4 oz of chopped cooked meat. That is a starter for six or a light supper for three.
- The saucesCelery sauce is a white sauce infused with celery and sieved; tomato sauce here means a thin cooked tomato sauce, not ketchup. Either needs to be pourable and served hot under or beside the eggs.
Stuffed or "forced" eggs of this kind run through nineteenth-century American and English cookery as a way of using up the Sunday roast: chicken, lamb or veal chopped fine, bound, and returned to the cavity left by the yolk. The Buckeye Cookbook was compiled in Ohio from contributions by Midwestern housekeepers and appeared in 1876, with the expanded Buckeye Cookery and Practical Housekeeping following in 1877; books of this kind are thick with this sort of thrift, and their egg chapters often treat eggs as a vehicle for whatever cold meat the pantry holds. The wire egg-basket named in the instructions was a common piece of kitchen tin at the time, sold for boiling and frying eggs in batches; its disappearance is a sign of how much equipment the recipe assumes. The dish belongs to the same family as the devilled egg, which keeps the halves and the mashed yolk but has no meat, crumb coating or frying fat.