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Eggs in a Nest
Take the green part of some cooked asparagus, and place it on a round hot dish to imitate a nest. To do this, place a row of heads slanting close together; go round with a second lot, bringing the heads in the opposite direction. Keep the centre clear by putting something to occupy it while arranging, and keep the dish over hot water. When sufficient is put on to make a thick nest, fill the middle with boiled eggs, shelled, and coated with thick white sauce, and serve with chopped parsley sprinkled over.
A composed cold-weather-proof arrangement rather than a cooked dish: the work is in the assembly, so have everything hot and ready before you start building.
- The hinge: build fast, keep hotAsparagus and coated eggs both cool quickly, and a béchamel skins over within a minute or two. Set the serving dish over a pan of simmering water, have the sauce hot and loose, and arrange the tips in one continuous motion rather than fussing over the pattern.
- "Something to occupy the centre"A ramekin, small bowl or upturned cup of about 3 inches across, lightly oiled so it lifts away without dragging the spears. Remove it only when the nest is complete.
- How much asparagusThe recipe uses the green upper part of the spears, the heads set in rows, so trim off the woody ends (they can go to soup). As a rough guide, two bunches of asparagus should yield enough for a nest around four to six eggs, though the recipe gives no quantity.
- Cooking the asparagusSome nineteenth-century instructions give asparagus 15 to 20 minutes, which collapses it. Tips need only a few minutes in well-salted water and should stay firm enough to hold their shape in the ring.
- The eggs"Boiled eggs, shelled" here means hard-boiled and cold enough to peel cleanly — 9 to 10 minutes for large eggs, then cooled in water. Softer yolks look better but will not survive being lifted and coated.
- Thick white sauceA white sauce of 1 oz butter, 1 oz flour and about ½ pint (10 fl oz, roughly 1¼ cups) milk, seasoned with salt, white pepper and a scrape of nutmeg, should coat the back of a spoon and cling to a peeled egg without sliding off.
- Yield and servingServes four to six as a light lunch or supper dish, one egg each. It must go to the table immediately and be served whole at the table, since the nest cannot be portioned in the kitchen without wrecking it.
Dishes of this kind — eggs bedded in a ring of green and masked with white sauce — belong to the late-Victorian conviction that a plain food became a dish through arrangement. The form is generally traced to French service, where œufs au nid set eggs in a border of some kind; English household books adopted the idea and simplified it to whatever the garden offered. The reader is not being taught to boil an egg but to compose a dish, at a period when asparagus was a short, expensive spring luxury and using only the green tips was itself a small display of plenty. The chopped parsley finish, the hot dish set over water, and the mask of béchamel are the standard grammar of the period's luncheon table.