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Eggs, Fricasseed, White
Boil six eggs hard, and cut each of them into half a dozen slices. Make a sauce as follows. Chop some parsley, a piece of shallot, and a few mushrooms, all very finely; put these into a stewpan with two ounces of butter; add salt and pepper, and stew, but do not brown, till quit done. Thicken with flour mixed with a small cupful of cream. Lay the slices of egg in; give the whole a boil, and serve. This fricassee may be varied by substituting a good, rich brown gravy for the cream. Time, ten to fifteen minutes to boil the eggs. Probable cost, 1s. 8d. for this quantity. Sufficient for three or four persons.
A Victorian meatless supper dish: hard-boiled eggs warmed through in a white herb-and-mushroom sauce. Two instructions in the original are worth ignoring.
- The hinge: do not boil the eggs in the sauce"Give the whole a boil" will toughen already-hard yolks and can split a flour-and-cream sauce. Slide the slices in, hold the pan just below a simmer for a minute or two until heated through, and serve.
- Ten to fifteen minutes is too longNine to ten minutes at a bare simmer gives a set yolk without the grey-green ring; then straight into cold water so they peel and slice cleanly. Use a wet knife or an egg slicer for six neat rounds per egg.
- StewpanA straight-sided saucepan with a lid. Any wide sauté pan works; you want enough surface area to drive the moisture out of the mushrooms.
- "A piece of shallot"One small shallot, finely chopped, for six eggs; the original gives no measure.
- "A small cupful of cream"Genuinely imprecise in the original — somewhere between a gill (a quarter of an imperial pint, 5 fl oz) and a full cup. Start with about half a cup and loosen the sauce further if it tightens; single or light cream is probably closer to ordinary Victorian cream than modern double.
- Thickening with flourRather than tipping dry flour into the cream, stir a tablespoon of flour into the buttery vegetables and cook it a minute before adding the cream off the heat. That removes the raw taste and prevents lumps.
- Do not brownThis is a white fricassee, so keep the heat low and the butter foaming rather than colouring. The brown-gravy variant at the end gives a different dish; the original simply substitutes a good, rich brown gravy for the cream.
- Yield and servingThree or four as the book says, which by modern portions means a light lunch or supper for two to three. It wants buttered toast, plain rice or boiled potatoes under it.
A fricassee is a French method rather than a fixed dish: ingredients gently stewed in butter and finished in a pale sauce, as distinct from a browned ragout, and Victorian cookery books commonly distinguished white fricassees from brown. It is a dish in which eggs do the structural work of meat, and Cassell's prints a probable cost of 1s. 8d. here as it does for its recipes generally. The parsley, shallot and mushroom base is close to a duxelles loosened with cream, a preparation of the professional kitchen that also appears in English domestic manuals of the period.