Home › The Principles of Cookery › Anchovy Eggs
Anchovy Eggs
Boil four eggs hard; when quite cold, shell them, and cut a little piece off each end so that they will stand. Cut them in halves crosswise and remove the yolks, which should be pounded together with a table-spoonful of anchovy paste and a sprinkling of cayenne. Refill each half egg with the mixture, and stand them on small squares of toast, freshly buttered and not too thin. Serve cold, garnished with parsley or small cress. Probable cost, 8d.
A Victorian savoury that reads almost exactly like a modern devilled egg, minus the mayonnaise. Two things carry it: eggs that are not overcooked, and enough anchovy to taste of anchovy.
- Boiling the eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring the older method produces. The recipe is right that they must be quite cold before shelling and cutting, or the halves tear.
- Anchovy pasteVictorian anchovy paste was closer to Gentleman's Relish territory — anchovy, butter, spice. Modern tubed anchovy paste is saltier and leaner; start with two teaspoons for four yolks, taste, and add the rest. Six oil-packed fillets mashed with a knob of soft butter may give something nearer that character.
- Binding the fillingFour yolks with a spoonful of paste can come out crumbly. A teaspoon of softened butter or thick cream loosens it enough to pipe, though the recipe says only to refill each half with the mixture.
- CayenneA sprinkling means a pinch, not a spoon. Anchovy is already assertive; the pepper is there to lift it, not to register as heat.
- The toast"Not too thin" matters — cut squares slightly larger than the egg base from bread about half an inch thick, toast, butter while hot, and let cool before setting the eggs on top. Assembled more than an hour ahead the toast softens.
- Trimming the endsSlicing a sliver off each end so the halves stand upright is the whole trick to serving these; do it before halving, not after, or you will crack the whites.
- Yield and costFour eggs give eight halves — a savoury course for four, or canapés for six to eight. The 8d. is the book's own Victorian retail estimate and is of historical interest only.
- Small cressThis is what is now sold as cress or garden cress, the seedling green in punnets. Mustard cress or pea shoots stand in perfectly well.
Anchovy Eggs belong to the British savoury — the small, sharp, salty course served after the sweet at a Victorian dinner, a habit peculiar to Britain and puzzling to French cooks of the same period. Anchovy in paste or essence form was one of the great store-cupboard flavourings of the nineteenth-century English kitchen, sold in pots alongside bottled sauces, and it appears throughout Cassell's in butters, toasts and forcemeats. It demonstrates a basic technique rather than a set piece: pound the yolk, sharpen it, put it back. Devilled and stuffed eggs of this kind are generally traced back much further than the Victorians — recipes for boiled eggs refilled with their pounded yolks and seasoning turn up in medieval and Renaissance collections — but the anchovy-and-cayenne version is distinctly of its own time and place.