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Bacon and Eggs, or Ham or Sausage and Eggs
This may be called a "country dish." In Devonshire and Cornwall it is the standing one when all others fail. A nice dish of bacon and eggs is to be had at every wayside house. It too often happens that this very plain repast is indifferently cooked. When the bacon or ham is fried see that the fat be quite free from burn before the eggs are slipped into it; baste them with the fat, trim them and drain the grease before dishing. Sausages should be slowly dressed, or they are apt to burst, and so spoil the appearance of a savoury meal. Serve with mashed potatoes round the dish. Time, about five minutes. Probable cost of bacon, 10d. to 1s. per pound; sausages, 10d. per pound.
Cassell's gives method rather than measurements here, and the method is sound. The points that matter are heat control and the state of the fat.
- The hinge: clean fatThe instruction to see that the fat is "quite free from burn" before the eggs go in is the whole recipe. Bacon leaves scorched specks and sediment behind; strain or wipe them out, or lower the heat and add a little fresh fat, before cracking the eggs. Burnt sediment turns the whites grey and bitter.
- Basting instead of flippingSpooning hot fat over the yolks sets the surface without turning the egg, which is how a wayside kitchen produced an unbroken yolk under a filmed white. Keep the pan at a bare sizzle; if the fat spits hard it is too hot and the underside will frill and toughen.
- Trim and drain"Trim" most likely means cutting away the ragged skirt of set white with a knife or the edge of the slice, so the egg sits as a neat round. Draining before dishing keeps the mashed potato border from going greasy.
- Sausages, slowlyModern sausages burst for the same reason Victorian ones did: rapid heat drives the moisture in the forcemeat to steam faster than the casing can stretch. Fifteen to twenty minutes over moderate heat, turning often, gets them through; the five-minute time given presumably refers to the eggs rather than the sausages, since it will not cook a sausage.
- Bacon then, bacon nowMuch British bacon of this period was dry-salted, often hard and salty, and cut thick from a whole side, though milder brine-cured bacon was also sold. Supermarket streaky rashers are wetter and will spit and shrink; drain the water off the pan before it has a chance to boil the meat rather than fry it.
- The prices10d. is ten old pence, a shilling twelve, so bacon runs about 1s. a pound at the top of the range. The figures are there so a housekeeper could cost a meal, not as a guide to quality.
- ServingNo yield is given. Reckon two eggs and two or three rashers per person, with the mashed potato piped or spooned round the rim of a warmed dish and the eggs laid inside it.
The point of the entry is that a dish everyone can cook is a dish most people cook badly. The West Country association it claims is real enough: Devon and Cornwall were pig-keeping counties, and a cottage or roadside inn with a flitch hanging in the chimney could put bacon and eggs on the table at any hour without notice, which is exactly what made it "the standing one when all others fail." Home-cured bacon was a household staple across rural England through the nineteenth century, salted and hung after the autumn pig-killing and cut into as needed. The insistence on trimming, draining and a border of mashed potato is the book's characteristic move: taking the plainest food in the country and holding it to the same standard of presentation as anything else that reached a dining table.