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EGGS (a la Duchesse)
Flavour one quart of milk with vanilla or orange-flower water; or, if preferred, boil it with lemon-rind, cinnamon, and bay-leaves till the flavour is extracted; strain, sweeten to taste, and when boiling have ready the whites of four eggs beaten to a froth. Drop these from a spoon into the boiling milk, remove when done, and then place them to drain. Send them to table in a glass dish, with a custard made with the yolks and some of the milk (with additional flavouring if required) poured over them. Time, two minutes to poach the whites. Probable cost, 9d. Sufficient for four or five persons.
This is oeufs à la neige under a grander name: meringue poached in sweetened milk, served over a custard made from the leftover yolks. The whole dish depends on never letting the milk or the custard reach a real boil once the eggs are involved.
- The quartCassell's is British, so this is an imperial quart of 40 fl oz — about 1.2 US quarts, or 5 US cups. Rounding to a US quart works, but you will have slightly less poaching depth and a thicker custard.
- Poaching heat"When boiling" is the one instruction to disregard. Bring the milk to a bare shiver, around 180F, before the meringues go in; at a rolling boil they inflate, break up and turn tough. The recipe's two minutes is the whole poaching time; turn them once part-way through.
- The whitesFour whites beaten stiff will give roughly eight to ten spoon-dropped ovals. A pinch of salt or cream of tartar helps them hold, and a tablespoon or two of sugar beaten in at the end makes them less likely to weep as they drain.
- DrainingLift them out with a slotted spoon onto a clean cloth or kitchen paper, not a plate — they shed milk for several minutes and will sit in a puddle otherwise.
- The custardFour yolks to the strained flavoured milk gives a thin pouring custard. Cook it over low heat or a bain-marie, stirring, until it coats the back of a spoon — 175–180F. Above about 185F it scrambles, and the poaching milk you are reusing is already hot, so temper carefully.
- FlavouringsOrange-flower water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries and is potent; a teaspoon in this quantity is plenty. The lemon-rind, cinnamon and bay infusion is the more savoury-edged option — bay in sweet custard is worth trying, and to many tastes reads as almond-like rather than herbal.
- Assembly and servingChill the custard before pouring it into the glass dish and float the meringues on top rather than under; they collapse if left submerged for hours. Serves four to five as the original says, best within a few hours of making.
- Probable costNinepence in late Victorian money was a genuine selling point for a dinner-party sweet — the appeal of the dish is that it makes two courses' worth of show out of a quart of milk and four eggs.
The English called this floating island, the French oeufs à la neige — eggs of snow — and cookery writers of the period used the two names loosely, sometimes for this poached-meringue version and sometimes for a whipped-cream-on-custard dish with no poaching at all. The "à la Duchesse" label is the sort of borrowed French dignity Cassell's applied freely; in the New Dictionary of Cookery, which ran to thousands of alphabetised entries and seems to have been aimed at middle-class households, such titles signalled that a cheap dish could be sent to table without apology. The underlying logic is thrift: a custard uses yolks, a meringue uses whites, and putting them in the same glass dish wastes nothing. Orange-flower water, common in British kitchens since the seventeenth century, was one of the perfumes used for such creams — alongside rosewater and other distilled waters — long before vanilla extract became cheap and general.