Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs, Carmelite
Eggs, Carmelite
Shell four hard-boiled eggs and roll them in a little flour. Chop up half a pound of lobster. Melt one ounce of butter, and mix smoothly with it one ounce of flour, then add the lobster, and pour in one gill of cold water. Stir, over the fire, till it boils and leaves the sides of the pan quite clean, season with salt and pepper, and spread on a plate to cool. Flatten out some of the mixture, and roll up an egg in it, keeping it in the shape of the egg. Brush each coated egg with some beaten egg, then roll it in bread-crumbs. When all are coated, fry them a golden brown in plenty of hot fat. Drain them on paper, and serve them either whole or cut in halves. Probable cost, 2s. for four portions.
A Victorian croquette in reverse: hard-boiled eggs jacketed in a stiff lobster panada, crumbed and deep-fried. Everything depends on how thick that panada gets.
- The hinge: cook the paste until it is stiff"Leaves the sides of the pan quite clean" is the instruction that matters. The roux-and-water mixture must be reduced to a paste stiff enough to hold a shape when cold; if it slumps on the plate it will slide off the eggs and burst in the fat.
- Chill, don't just coolSpread the mixture no more than half an inch thick and refrigerate it until firm, at least an hour. A modern warm kitchen will not set it.
- A gillIn this British book a gill is a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz, roughly 2/3 US cup. With 1 oz each of butter and flour that gives a very tight panada, which is the point.
- LobsterHalf a pound means picked meat, not shell weight. Chop it fine rather than in chunks so the coating stays cohesive; brown claw and knuckle meat works as well as tail. Cooked crab or firm white fish stands in acceptably.
- SeasoningSalt and pepper alone is thin by current taste. Cayenne, a little lemon juice or anchovy, and mace turn up often in Victorian lobster recipes and are entirely in keeping.
- Frying"Plenty of hot fat" means deep fat; in modern terms about 350-375F. Everything inside is already cooked, so you are only setting the crumb: three to four minutes to a deep gold. Fry two at a time so the temperature holds.
- Coating orderThe initial dusting of flour on the peeled eggs gives the damp white something to grip. Chill the assembled eggs again after crumbing to reduce splitting in the fat.
- Yield and servingFour portions, one egg each, as a savoury or light supper dish. Halved lengthwise they show the lobster layer, which is the reason to cut them; serve with fried parsley and a sharp sauce such as tartare.
In nineteenth-century cookery the label "Carmelite" or a la carmelite is often found on fish and egg dishes, and is usually traced to the mendicant friars and the meatless days of the church calendar, when eggs, shellfish and fish stood in for meat; a browned exterior recalling the friars' habit is sometimes offered as the explanation too. Whatever the origin of the name, the dish is a good specimen of the technique of the panada: a stiff paste of flour, butter and liquid, the same base used for croquettes and quenelles, here doing the work of stretching half a pound of expensive lobster across four servings. The stated cost of two shillings is a reminder that lobster was a comparative luxury, and that a Victorian cook's skill lay largely in making a little of it read as plenty.