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Eggs, Blancmange Of
Empty four or five large eggs by making a small opening at one end. Wash them with a little warm water, and then drain dry. Fix them steadily into egg-cups, or put them into a dish filled with rice or sago, and fill with blancmange by the same aperture through which the egg contents escaped. Do not disturb them till quite cold. Carefully remove the shells, and serve the blancmange eggs in a glass dish with a coloured cream around them, or shred a lemon or orange into the lightest of fine strips, and lay them amongst it.
A Victorian trompe-l'œil: eggshells used as moulds so that the blancmange comes to the table looking like a dish of peeled eggs. Nothing here is difficult, but the shells decide whether it works.
- What blancmange means hereA sweetened milk jelly set with gelatine, isinglass or cornflour, flavoured with almond, vanilla or lemon. Cassell's assumes you already have a blancmange recipe in hand; any firm-setting version works, but it must be firm — a wobbly set will collapse the moment the shell comes off.
- Fill it hot, and slightly stiffThe blancmange has to be liquid enough to pour through a hole the size of a pea and firm enough to unmould cleanly. Use it while still hot and thin, and go a little heavier on the setting agent than you would for a moulded shape, since these have no support at all once peeled.
- Scald the shells"Wash with a little warm water" is not enough by modern standards. Rinse the emptied shells, then hold them in briskly boiling water for a minute and drain: eggshells and the raw contents that have just passed through them can carry salmonella, and the blancmange then sits in the shell for hours. Pouring the mixture in hot helps as well.
- Making the openingTap a small hole at the pointed end with the back of a knife, pick the shell fragments away with tweezers, then break the yolk with a skewer and shake or blow the contents out. Aim for 8-10 mm — smaller and filling becomes impossible, larger and the finished shape looks cut off.
- Holding them steadyEgg-cups work, but a shallow dish of dry rice, sago, or coarse salt is better because you can bed each shell at whatever angle keeps the hole uppermost. Fill to the brim; the blancmange shrinks slightly as it sets.
- Setting time"Till quite cold" means several hours in the refrigerator — allow four, or overnight. Do not attempt to peel a shell that is merely cool.
- PeelingCrack the shell all over against a hard surface, then lift the pieces away starting at the filling hole. Any membrane clinging to the surface can be rubbed off with a damp fingertip.
- Coloured creamA thin pouring custard or sweetened cream tinted pink with a little fruit purée, or green with spinach juice in the period manner. Modern equivalents: raspberry coulis, thin crème anglaise, or a mango purée for the yolk-yellow joke.
- YieldFour or five eggs makes a dessert for two, allowing two apiece. The mixed contents you have blown out will keep a day or two covered in the refrigerator and should go into something cooked.
Blancmange takes its name from Old French for "white eating", and in medieval and early modern kitchens it was a dish of pounded almonds, sometimes with capon or rice, set pale and firm. By the nineteenth century it had narrowed to a sweet milk jelly stiffened with isinglass, calf's-foot gelatine or the new packaged gelatines and cornflours, which is what Cassell's means. The eggshell trick belongs to the Victorian appetite for dishes that pretend to be other dishes — mock turtle, mock goose, sweetbreads dressed as chicken — and to a table culture in which a cook's ingenuity was expected to show. The arrangement here, on a glass dish with tinted cream and threads of citrus peel, is very much in that spirit.