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Eggs, Buttered
Brown some butter in a frying-pan, and break five eggs upon a dish, as if for poaching, with a seasoning of salt and nutmeg; pour some of the butter, in its boiling state, over them, and move them gently to get all the butter about them; put the dish by the fire to keep hot, and finish browning the eggs with a red-hot shovel if you have no salamander. Time to brown butter, etc., about ten minutes. Probable cost, 7d. Sufficient for one dish.
A Victorian way of cooking eggs without ever putting them in a pan: hot browned butter is poured over raw eggs in a shallow dish, and the tops are finished with radiant heat from above. The whole thing depends on the butter being genuinely hot and the dish being hot too.
- The hinge: butter temperatureThe eggs cook mainly from the butter poured over them, so it must be poured while still foaming and nut-brown, straight from the pan. Butter that has cooled to merely warm will leave the whites slack and translucent.
- Browning the butterThe ten minutes given covers the whole operation ('Time to brown butter, etc.'), presumably over a fire rather than a modern burner; on gas or induction, browning the butter alone takes two to three minutes in a light pan. Take it off when the milk solids are hazelnut-coloured and it smells toasted, not acrid.
- Salamander and red-hot shovelA salamander was an iron plate on a handle, heated in the fire and held over food to colour it. The modern equivalent is an overhead broiler at its highest setting or a cook's blowtorch. Do not heat a household shovel for this.
- The dish"Break five eggs upon a dish" implies a shallow heatproof earthenware or metal dish, warmed first. A cold dish absorbs the butter's heat and the eggs will sit largely uncooked in it.
- NutmegGrated nutmeg with eggs and butter is standard Victorian seasoning and is worth keeping; use a light grating, since freshly grated nutmeg is far more assertive than the pre-ground kind.
- DonenessAs written, the yolks stay soft and the whites may be barely set beneath the browned surface. If you want the whites firm throughout, keep the dish under the broiler until they are opaque to the edges rather than relying on the butter alone. Anyone who should avoid undercooked egg should use pasteurised eggs or choose another dish.
- Yield and cost"Sufficient for one dish" means one serving dish for the table rather than a single portion; the recipe gives no number of eaters. The 7d. is the book's estimated cost in pre-decimal pence, a fossil of Victorian pricing rather than a guide to anything now.
Buttered eggs in nineteenth-century English cookery covered several things — sometimes what we would call scrambled eggs, sometimes, as here, eggs set in hot fat in a dish. This version belongs to the family of French oeufs sur le plat, cooked and served in the same shallow vessel, and its distinguishing touch is beurre noisette, butter cooked until the milk solids brown and turn nutty. The instruction to finish with "a red-hot shovel if you have no salamander" places the recipe firmly in the age of the open range: top heat was something you carried to the food rather than switched on, and the salamander — a heavy iron disc on a long handle, heated in the coals — was standard kitchen equipment. Cassell's, compiled for middle-class households from around the 1870s onwards, routinely gives such a fallback, and it prices each dish to the penny.