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Eggs for Supper
Beat up six eggs, yolks and whites, add to them two or three young onions and some parsley shredded very fine; season with salt and pepper. Mix the above with equal quantities of melted butter and grated cheese, about two ounces of each, and fry lightly, stirring the mixture briskly while in the pan (see OMELET). Time, six to eight minutes to fry. Probable cost, 10d. Sufficient for two or three persons.
A cheese-and-onion scramble under a Victorian name. The whole thing hangs on heat control: at the six to eight minutes given here, over anything more than a gentle flame, the eggs will be dry and the cheese stringy.
- "Melted butter" — read it plainlyElsewhere in Cassell's, melted butter is the standard flour-thickened butter sauce. Here, paired with an equal weight of grated cheese and given as "about two ounces of each", it reads as two ounces of plain butter simply melted. Two ounces is 4 tablespoons (55 g), which is generous for six eggs; half that is enough for a nonstick pan.
- Young onionsSpring onions or scallions, greens and all. The two or three the recipe calls for, shredded fine, suit six eggs.
- The cheeseGrated cheese in a British book of this period would generally be a firm hard cheese; Cheshire and Cheddar are likely candidates. Add it late, off the fiercest heat, so it melts into the curd rather than seizing into threads.
- Heat and timingSix to eight minutes is a long time for beaten eggs. It only works over low to moderate heat with constant stirring, which is plainly what "stirring the mixture briskly" intends. Pull the pan while the eggs are still visibly loose; residual heat finishes them.
- Not an omelet, despite the cross-referenceThe instruction to stir throughout produces a soft scramble, closer to a French brouillade than to a folded omelet. What the reference to OMELET is meant to convey is not stated; the finished dish is plainly not a folded one.
- SeasoningSalt the eggs just before they go into the pan rather than long in advance, and remember the cheese brings its own salt.
- Cost and yieldTenpence in pre-decimal money, an everyday sum for a supper dish. Two to three servings, as stated; on hot buttered toast it stretches comfortably to three.
Supper, in the late-Victorian household this book was written for, was the light meal that followed a substantial midday or evening dinner — eggs, cheese, a rechauffe of something cold, served without ceremony. Cassell's carries many such entries, and this one is typical: cheap, quick, made from things a kitchen already had, and requiring nothing but a frying pan. The combination of eggs, spring onion and hard cheese has no single origin worth claiming; it is the sort of dish that exists wherever hens, onions and a cheese-shelf coincide, and its appearance here reflects the book's function as a household reference rather than a record of any particular tradition.