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EGGS (a la Foie Gras)
Cut six or more hard-boiled eggs in halves, and take out the yolks; fill the cavities with pate de foie gras, season with pepper and salt, and dish each piece on a thin slice of brown bread and butter. Pass the yolks through a sieve, and sprinkle them over all. Probable cost, 2s.
A cold savoury of the deviled-egg family, assembled rather than cooked. The only technical demands are a clean-cooked egg and a filling soft enough to pipe or spoon without tearing the white.
- Hard-boiled, not overcookedTwelve minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring. The whites need to stay firm enough to hold a filling and sit on the bread without collapsing.
- What "pate de foie gras" meant hereIn a British book of this date the phrase covers both true foie gras terrine and the cheaper potted liver preparations often sold under the name. Any smooth, spreadable liver pâté works; let it come to cool room temperature so it can be worked without breaking the whites.
- Quantity of fillingSix eggs give twelve halves and take roughly 4 to 5 oz (about 120-140 g) of pâté. Mashing a spoonful of the sieved yolk into the pâté extends it and lightens the texture, though the recipe does not ask for it.
- The sieved yolkThis is the mimosa finish: push the yolks through a fine sieve with the back of a spoon and scatter them at the last moment. Sieved in advance they dry out and clump.
- Brown bread and butterA dense wholemeal, cut thin, buttered to the edge, crusts off, then cut into rounds or squares a little larger than the egg half. Butter is structural here — it keeps the bread from going soggy under the egg.
- Cost"Probable cost, 2s." is two shillings for the dish as a whole, a figure Cassell's gives throughout so a housekeeper could budget. It tells you foie gras was an indulgence but not an unthinkable one in a middle-class kitchen.
- Yield and servingSix eggs make twelve pieces, enough for six as a first course or a dozen at a cold table. Assemble within an hour of serving and keep refrigerated until then; the whites weep if they stand.
Cassell's places this among cold savouries and hors d'oeuvre, a category that expanded rapidly in late Victorian and Edwardian Britain as French charcuterie became available in tins and pots from grocers and Italian warehousemen. Foie gras itself is often traced to the force-feeding of geese in ancient Egypt, though that attribution rests on tomb reliefs whose purpose is disputed, and it reached its modern form in Alsace and the south-west of France; by the nineteenth century Strasbourg pâté was a standard luxury import, familiar enough to English readers to be named without explanation. The dish is characteristic of the book's approach to that luxury — a small, expensive ingredient stretched over a dozen egg halves and a plate of bread and butter, dressed up with the sieved-yolk garnish that French cooks are said to call mimosa for its resemblance to the flower, though the name is not necessarily contemporary with the recipe. Recipes of this kind, requiring no cooking beyond boiling an egg, belonged to the supper table, the ball buffet and the savoury course served after the sweet at dinner, a distinctively British habit.