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Eggs, Frascati
Boil six eggs hard, and shell them carefully. Beat up an egg and dip the six eggs in it. Roll them in breadcrumbs, and fry them in boiling fat to a golden brown. Serve with a good white sauce poured round them. Grated or potted ham or tongue may with advantage be mixed with the bread-crumbs. Probable cost, 1s.
A late-Victorian cousin of the Scotch egg, minus the sausage: hard-boiled eggs crumbed, fried and set in white sauce. The whole thing hinges on the coating gripping a wet, slippery egg.
- Dry and flour firstShelled boiled eggs are damp and the crumb slides off in the fat. Pat them thoroughly dry and roll them in seasoned flour before the beaten egg; the original gives no flouring step.
- Boiling the eggsTen minutes at a bare simmer, then straight into cold water, gives a firm yolk without the grey-green ring. Older eggs peel more cleanly than very fresh ones.
- "Boiling fat"This means deep fat at about 350-375F, not fat at boiling point. The eggs are already cooked, so they need only a minute or two to colour the crust; longer and the whites turn rubbery.
- Potted ham or tonguePotted meat was a spiced, butter-sealed paste sold in jars. Any fine-textured ham or tongue paste works, or simply mince cooked ham very finely; use roughly a quarter its volume to the crumbs so the coating still crisps.
- A good white sauceThe recipe specifies only 'a good white sauce'. A plain milk-and-roux sauce suits it: butter and flour cooked to a blond roux, milk added by degrees, simmered until it coats a spoon, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg. Pour it round the eggs rather than over, so the crust stays crisp.
- BreadcrumbsDry white crumbs, sieved fine, are the likeliest reading, though the recipe says only 'bread-crumbs'. Panko browns faster and coarser, which is fine but gives a different, spikier finish.
- Yield and costSix eggs serve three as a light lunch or supper dish, or six halved as a savoury. 'Probable cost, 1s.' is one shilling for the whole dish, the sort of costing Cassell's routinely appended to its recipes.
Cassell's belongs to the great age of the English egg dish, when a well-run household was expected to produce a dozen different suppers from a basket of eggs and whatever cold meat the larder held. The name is usually connected with Frascati's, the celebrated Paris cafe and gaming house of the early nineteenth century, whose name became attached to a family of garnishes in the French repertoire -- though the link is traditional rather than documented, and by the time the label reached an English dictionary of cookery it seems to have meant little more than something dressed up in the French manner. The technique itself is older and homelier: crumbing and frying a hard-boiled egg is the same idea behind the Scotch egg, which appears in English cookery books by the later eighteenth century, and behind the Indian nargisi kofta. What is characteristically Victorian here is the potted ham or tongue worked into the crumbs, a thrifty use of the jarred meat pastes common in well-stocked store cupboards.