Home › The Principles of Cookery › Egg Salad
Egg Salad
Boil eight eggs hard, chop the yolks and whites separately; put a little salad into a dish, cover it with the eggs in layers. When done, make a hole in the middle and pour in a little thick mayonnaise sauce.
A Victorian composed salad rather than the bound, mayonnaise-mixed egg salad the name suggests today. The instructions are terse, so most of the work is in reading what is assumed.
- "A little salad"In nineteenth-century usage "salad" on its own generally means the salad greens, most often lettuce. Dress the leaves lightly before laying the eggs on top, since no further seasoning reaches them once they are covered.
- Hard-boiled, not overboiledTen minutes at a bare simmer for large eggs, then straight into cold water. The point of the dish is the contrast between bright yellow and clean white, and a grey-green ring at the yolk edge spoils it.
- Chopping separatelyThe recipe chops yolks and whites apart and keeps them apart until they go into the dish, so the layers read as distinct bands rather than a speckled mass.
- "When done"Means when the layering is finished, not when anything is cooked. Build the eggs up in alternating layers, then make a hole in the centre for the sauce.
- Thick mayonnaiseThick is the operative word - a thin sauce runs through the layers and collapses them. A stiff, well-emulsified mayonnaise that holds its shape on a spoon is wanted; commercial jarred mayonnaise is stiff enough as it comes.
- Raw yolk in the sauceHomemade mayonnaise is uncooked egg. If serving anyone pregnant, elderly or immune-compromised, use pasteurised eggs or a commercial mayonnaise.
- YieldEight eggs will serve six to eight as a first course or side salad. Assemble within an hour of serving and keep it cold; the layers slump as the dressed leaves weep.
Egg salads of this composed kind belong to the late nineteenth-century fashion for salades arranged for the eye as much as the palate, when a cold table was expected to show pattern and colour. Separating chopped yolk from chopped white was a standard garnishing device of the period, used on everything from cold salmon to aspics, and it survives today mainly in the Polish and Russian layered salads and in the "mimosa" garnish of sieved yolk. Cassell's places the recipe among its salad instructions, and a dish that needed nothing but boiling water and a bowl of mayonnaise could be sent up at short notice. The mayonnaise itself was hand-whisked and unstable in warm weather.