Home › The Principles of Cookery › Eggs for Salad
Eggs for Salad
Remove the shells carefully from six hard-boiled eggs, cut them in halves lengthwise, and carefully take out the yolks. Pound these with two ounces of ham, one ounce of anchovies, the same of veal and fat bacon, salt, cayenne, and mace to taste, add also a spoonful of minced sweet herbs, and one of parsley. Fill the eggs neatly with this forcemeat, smooth them to a round shape with the blade of a large knife, and place a star of beetroot upon each one. When thus prepared use them to garnish salad. If preferred, the eggs can be put on a dish, and served with well-flavoured brown sauce poured round them. In this case they may be garnished with fried sippets.
A Victorian stuffed-egg garnish that reads plausibly until you notice nothing in the filling is ever cooked. The vocabulary is worth unpicking even if the dish is not one to attempt.
- The uncooked forcemeatThe veal and fat bacon are pounded raw into the yolk mixture, and the finished eggs are either laid cold on a salad or briefly surrounded with sauce. Neither treatment brings the meat anywhere near a safe internal temperature, and pounding spreads any surface bacteria through the whole mass. Use a current recipe for stuffed eggs instead.
- "The same of veal and fat bacon"Probably one ounce each, following the ounce of anchovies, though the compressed phrasing could equally mean one ounce of the two combined. The original does not settle it.
- AnchoviesBritish cooks of this period had salted anchovies from a barrel or bottled anchovy essence rather than modern oil-packed fillets, which are softer and carry their own oil, so an ounce would behave differently in a paste. The recipe itself says nothing about rinsing or boning them.
- MaceThe dried outer covering of the nutmeg, sold as blades or ground, warmer and less sweet than nutmeg itself. Victorian forcemeats use it freely. The recipe leaves the amount to taste.
- SippetsSmall triangles or fingers of bread, fried or toasted, and a common edging for a dish served with sauce.
- The beetroot starCut from a slice of cooked beetroot, presumably with a small aspic or truffle cutter. It is purely decorative, supplying colour against the white of the egg.
- YieldSix eggs give twelve halves. The recipe gives no number of servings.
The late-Victorian dinner table was judged partly on how a dish was dressed, and a cook was expected to keep a repertoire of small, uniform, brightly finished objects to set round a salad or a cold joint. Stuffed halved eggs with a pounded savoury filling are much older than this book and appear across European cookery under names such as oeufs farcis; what marks the Victorian version is the forcemeat habit, the reflex of pounding ham, anchovy, veal and bacon fat into a paste for almost any hollow that needed filling. The alternative service with brown sauce and fried sippets shows the same dish doing double duty, cold garnish or hot entree.