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Eggs, Buttered, and Mushrooms
Put two ounces of butter into a saucepan; when melted add four fresh eggs well beaten, a table-spoonful of chopped mushrooms, and salt and pepper to taste. Stir them over the fire until quite thick. Pour over hot buttered toast and serve without delay. Probable cost, 10d.
This is scrambled eggs by their older English name, enriched with a spoonful of mushroom. The whole thing takes under five minutes, and the only real skill is knowing when to stop.
- The hinge: take them off earlyEggs stirred "until quite thick" over direct heat will keep cooking in the pan and on the toast. Pull them while they still look slightly looser than you want, off the heat, and let the residual warmth finish them.
- Low heat, not briskA Victorian range gave a cook a cool corner as easily as a hot one. On a modern burner use low, and lift the pan away when the curd starts to set fast.
- The butter is not a typoTwo ounces (about 4 tablespoons, 55 g) to four eggs reads as extravagant, but the fat is what keeps the curd soft and glossy. You can halve it and still get a good result, just a firmer one.
- Cook the mushrooms firstA tablespoon of raw chopped mushroom will shed water into the eggs and slacken them. Sweat the mushrooms in a little of the butter until their liquid has gone, then add the eggs to the same pan.
- Which mushroomsThe recipe says only "chopped mushrooms" and leaves the kind open; field or cultivated button mushrooms, or a spoonful from a jar of preserved ones, would all suit. Chestnut or cremini give more flavour than plain whites; skip anything with a strong dark liquor, which will grey the eggs.
- Season at the endThe recipe adds salt and pepper with the eggs. If you prefer, beat and cook first and season as the curd forms; some cooks hold that salt left sitting in raw egg slackens it, though the point is disputed.
- YieldFour eggs serves two as a light supper or breakfast, one as a substantial one. Have the toast buttered and waiting before the eggs go in the pan.
- "Probable cost, 10d."Ten pence in pre-decimal money. Cassell's gives a "probable cost" line for most of its entries.
"Buttered eggs" is the older English term for what we now call scrambled: eggs stirred in melted butter until they thicken, distinct from an omelette, which is set rather than stirred. The phrase appears in earlier English cookery books. Cassell's, published in parts in the 1870s, was aimed at middle-class households with a cook and a coal range, and it treats the egg alphabetically across a run of small variations. Mushrooms were a natural partner because dried mushroom powder and bottled mushroom ketchup were standard Victorian store-cupboard flavourings, and fresh field mushrooms were a seasonal windfall rather than a year-round purchase.