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Egg Toast
Place a bowl containing three ounces of good butter in boiling water, and stir until the butter is quite melted; mix it with four well-beaten eggs, and put them together into a saucepan, keeping the mixture moving round in one direction until it becomes heated; then pour it quickly into a basin, and back again into the saucepan. Repeat this until it is hot, but on no account must it be boiling. Have ready some slices of buttered toast, lay the mixture of egg thickly over, and serve very hot. Time, about five minutes. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for two persons.
This is scrambled egg in its richest Victorian form — buttery, barely set, spooned over toast. The whole technique is about keeping the eggs below the point at which they curdle.
- The hinge: never let it boilEgg proteins set at around 150–160F; at boiling they tighten and weep, and the butter breaks out as grease. The pouring back and forth between basin and pan is a deliberate cooling device, letting off heat while the residual warmth of the pan carries the cooking forward. Keep the heat very low and lift the pan off whenever it feels close.
- Butter quantityThree ounces (about 6 tablespoons) of butter to four eggs is several times what a modern cook would use. Halving it gives a looser, more familiar scramble; keeping it gives something closer to a warm egg sauce.
- "Good butter"In this period butter varied enormously in salt, water content and freshness, so recipes routinely specified good butter. Use unsalted so you can season the eggs yourself — the original gives no salt or pepper, and it needs both.
- Melting the butterThe bowl set in boiling water is a bain-marie, used to melt butter without letting it sizzle or separate. A heatproof bowl over a pan of hot water does the same, or melt it in the pan over the lowest heat before the eggs go in.
- DonenessTake it off the heat while it still looks slightly underdone and glossy; it will continue to thicken from the heat of the pan and the bowl. The stated five minutes is optimistic unless the pan is already warm — allow eight to ten over gentle heat.
- Probable costTenpence in old currency, for a dish serving two, as the recipe states. The figures are useless as prices now, and served mainly to let a reader compare one dish against another.
- ToastButter the toast and top it at the last moment. The egg mixture is loose and will soak straight through bread that has been sitting.
Egg toast belongs to a family of Victorian supper and breakfast dishes — buttered eggs, egg sauce, savoury toasts — built on the idea that a slice of toast could carry almost anything and make it a course. The stirring in one direction, repeated in cookery books of the period, has no chemical basis, but the pouring between pan and basin does: it is an effective way of moderating heat without a thermometer, the same principle as tempering a custard. The butter-heavy result is close to what the Irish and English tradition called buttered eggs.