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EGGS (a l'Italienne)
Break seven or eight eggs into a saucepan, with a bit of butter in it. Add the juice of a lemon, a glass of white wine, enough pounded sugar to make them decidedly sweet, a pinch of salt, and any approved flavouring, such as orange-flower water or curacoa. Then proceed exactly as with scrambled eggs (see EGGS, SCRAMBLED). When they are set without being hard, pile them on a hot dish, dust them well with sugar, and candy it a little either under a salamander or with a red-hot fire shovel.
A sweet scrambled egg, finished with a caramelised sugar crust. The whole dish turns on heat control: the acid from the lemon and wine makes the curd far more likely to break than in a plain scramble.
- Low heat, constant stirringCook over the gentlest heat possible, stirring without pause, and pull the pan off the burner while the eggs still look slightly loose. Acid and sugar both destabilise egg protein, so the window between creamy and weeping is narrower here than with ordinary scrambled eggs.
- A glass of white wine'a glass' in Victorian books is usually reckoned at about 2 fl oz (60 ml), though the measure was never standardised. With seven or eight eggs that is enough to loosen the mixture noticeably; use a dry wine, and reduce it a little in the pan first if you want less liquid.
- Pounded sugarThis is sugar crushed fine in a mortar, the equivalent of caster or superfine sugar today. The recipe gives no quantity beyond 'decidedly sweet'; three or four tablespoons for eight eggs is a reasonable starting point. The original has it in the pan from the beginning, but adding it off the direct heat helps it dissolve rather than catch.
- Salamander and fire shovelA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated in the fire and held over a dish to brown the top. An overhead broiler at its highest setting, or a cook's blowtorch, does the same job. Do not attempt the red-hot shovel.
- The sugar crustDust the piled eggs with an even, thin layer of caster sugar and glaze quickly, close to the element. Anything thicker than a light coating will melt into syrup and slide off the mound before it colours.
- FlavouringsOrange-flower water is still sold in Middle Eastern groceries and is potent: a scant teaspoon is plenty. Curaçao is an orange liqueur; Cointreau or triple sec stands in directly.
- YieldEight eggs serves four as a dessert or a substantial sweet course. It does not hold, so glaze and carry it straight to the table.
Sweet egg dishes sit oddly with modern breakfast habits, but they were entirely ordinary in earlier European cookery, where eggs, sugar, citrus and rosewater or orange-flower water belonged together as readily as eggs and bacon do now. The label a l'Italienne in a nineteenth-century English book is a loose one and need not point to any specific regional source, and the finish here is essentially the same trick as a creme brulee: a dusting of fine sugar caught under fierce top heat. Cassell's New Dictionary of Cookery, compiled for middle-class households in the later Victorian decades, assumes its readers have a salamander or at least an open fire and a shovel that can be heated in it, one of the clearest signs of how much kitchen equipment was still improvised from the hearth.