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EGGS (a la Carmelite)
Chop some sorrel, a little parsley, and two or three small boiled onions together; add the yolks of six hard-boiled eggs, chopped separately; season with pepper and salt, and mix with a little melted butter. Fill the whites of the eggs, which should be divided in halves, lengthwise, with this mixture, and warm them thoroughly in a white sauce composed of two ounces of butter and a quarter of a pint of cream, with a blade of mace to flavour. If flour be used it should be only sufficient to prevent the butter from oiling. Serve with a little lemon-juice squeezed into the sauce. Time, twenty minutes to boil eggs. Probable cost, 1s. 4d.
A Victorian stuffed-egg dish, closer to a warm hors d'oeuvre than a salad. The only real problem is the timing.
- Boil the eggs far lessTwenty minutes gives a chalky, greenish yolk and a rubbery white. Ten to twelve minutes in simmering water is enough for a firm yolk that still mashes smoothly; cool in cold water before peeling and halving.
- SorrelThe lemony leaf the recipe leans on for acidity. It is a farmers' market item rather than a supermarket one; if you cannot get it, spinach plus extra lemon juice is the usual substitute, though the flavour is flatter.
- A quarter of a pint of creamIn imperial measure that is 5 fl oz, roughly two-thirds of a US cup. Two ounces of butter is half a stick.
- A blade of maceOne piece of the dried aril of nutmeg, infused in the cream and then removed. A pinch of ground mace, or nutmeg grated in at the end, does the same work.
- Keep the sauce below a simmerThis is essentially butter and cream held in suspension with a trace of flour. Let it boil and the butter separates, which is exactly what the note about "oiling" is warning against. Warm the filled halves gently, spooning sauce over them.
- Flour, measuredFlour, sparingly -- "Only sufficient" gives no quantity; a level teaspoon or so would be enough for this amount of butter and cream, cooked briefly in the butter before the cream goes in. More turns it into a b"chamel and dulls the cream.
- Lemon juice last, off the heatAcid dropped into hot cream can split it. Squeeze it in after the pan leaves the burner, and serve at once.
- YieldSix eggs give twelve filled halves, enough for four as a first course or two as a light supper with bread.
Cassell's ran to a great many egg preparations, and this is one of the dressed-and-sauced sort that filled the first-course slot in a late-Victorian dinner. Dishes styled à la Carmélite are generally traced to the Carmelite orders and, by extension, to meatless cookery for fast days. That fits here: no meat, no stock, sorrel and onion carrying the flavour, and a white sauce of nothing but butter, cream and mace. Sorrel itself was a far more ordinary garden crop in Britain then than now, valued precisely because its own sharpness stood in for the lemon or vinegar a cook might otherwise reach for. The "probable cost, 1s. 4d." is a habit of the book, which priced almost every dish so a household could weigh a first course against the week's budget.